A sizable minority of America’s youth aren’t in school or attached to the labor force. And it’s costing taxpayers big.

About 17 percent of America’s young people are “opportunity youth” — or people ages 16-24 who aren’t attached to the labor force — according to a report prepared by researchers for the Corporation for National and Community Service and the White House Council for Community Solutions (h/t Think Progress). Each one of these 6.7 million young people is costing taxpayers $13,900 per year and it doesn’t stop there. After 25 years old, they’ll cost taxpayers $170,740 over their lifetime, the report found.

That means that in total, those currently classified as so-called opportunity youth will cost taxpayers $1.56 trillion in present value terms over their whole lifetime.

“Both taxpayers and society lose out when the potential of these youth is not realized,” the report said.

There is clearly work that needs to be done, even if it’s simply keeping streets clean and roads repaired. It’s not as if these youth are unwilling or unable to perform tasks like that, either. A government run guaranteed employment program would allow us to provide a social safety net for anyone on hard times; this translates to less crime, less poverty, fewer evictions or major financial repercussions, better education for the populace and a more stable environment for any children.

It could look like the unemployment office now, except that instead of being handed leads for employment after you’re done with the paperwork and waiting on a bimonthly check, you pick from a series of jobs that need to be done by the government (infrastructure and community building, primarily) and are paid a living wage until you can find a better job.

It would definitely cost money, but maybe not as much as you might think. We already pay huge sums of money as a consequence of our unemployment rates. Increased crime rates means more money spent on police work, judicial processes and incarceration. Less access to healthcare (without a steady check, insurance is tough to maintain) means increased reliance on emergency care, a more expensive and less effective option.

We’ve already spent $434 Billion on unemployment benefits, $185 billion of which was paid by taxation. I’m not saying that it would pay for itself, but surely a tax increase is worth all the benefits.

McConnell is offering a philosophical response to a practical problem. It gets back to what we discussed last week — the right simply cannot fathom a pragmatic approach to governing. Democrats see a jobs crisis, want to save hundreds of thousands of jobs, craft a plan that works, and find a straightforward way to pay for it. Republicans see a jobs crisis and ask, “Are those public-sector jobs? What does our ideology tell us about aid to states? Unemployment, schlumemploymet — how does this affect the size of government?”

The GOP line doesn’t address the underlying problem because, as McConnell explained yesterday, Republicans don’t care about the underlying problem. What matters is the integrity of conservative ideology, not keeping teachers and cops on the job.

Notice, McConnell didn’t say the Democratic jobs bill would be ineffective. He knows — everyone knows — the measure would keep those Americans working, which would not only help the workers and their families, but also the local economies and those who benefit from their services. But for the Senate Minority Leader, whether the legislation would be effective or not is irrelevant.

Bringing down unemployment isn’t McConnell’s priority. Winning a philosophical argument is.

(Source: sarahlee310)

Labor Department data show that only a tiny percentage of companies that experience large layoffs cite government regulation as the reason. Since Barack Obama took office, just two-tenths of 1 percent of layoffs have been due to government regulation, the data show.

Businesses frequently complain about regulation, but there is little evidence that it is any worse now than in the past or that it is costing significant numbers of jobs. Most economists believe there is a simpler explanation: Companies aren’t hiring because there isn’t enough consumer demand…

Concerns over regulation have increased in the past two years - only 11 percent cited it in April 2009, not long after Obama entered the White House. But the rise hasn’t been outside historical norms. More small businesses complained about regulation during the administrations of President Bill Clinton and the President George H.W. Bush, according to an analysis of the federation’s data by the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

High levels of economic uncertainty are another drag on business, but economists say that’s less due to regulation than to fights over government spending and taxes. Both consumer and business confidence fell in August, for example, as the White House and Congress wrangled over the nation’s borrowing limit.

The idea that regulations by the government are strangling businesses to death or bleeding the economy dry of jobs has absolutely no factual basis.