Can the United States Economy Be Fixed?

The United States is struggling to keep jobs or for that matter create jobs. Creating jobs is only part of the solution because those jobs have to at least pay a living wage. Part-time jobs don't pay normal household bills every month.

Here are some facts about United States citizens and what it means about employment, tax base, and the future of our country:

Currently, according to the US Census Bureau there are 308,146,231 people living in the United States as of December 13^th 2009.

Now out of that total roughly 53,000,000 million citizens are receiving Social Security.

According to a study by Northeastern University, there are roughly 29,370,000 million Americans (May 2009) that is underutilized such as they can't find a job or are in part-time jobs and can't find fulltime employment or unemployed.

Currently, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics there are only 154,336,000 (includes the 29,370,000 people either underutilized, reserves or unemployed) working Americans out of the 308,146,231 citizens.

According to CNN (2007), there were about 7,400,000 million people in prison. I'm sure that number has increased since it is 2009 now.

That leaves around roughly 90,000,000 citizens that are children ages 0-18.

The reality is that even though we have 308,146,231 citizens only half of the citizens are contributing something to the employment of our country. The statistics above show us that taxpayers are paying for 53,000,000 social security recipients and that number will continue to rise as the baby boomers keep getting older. Also, taxpayers pay for over 8,000,000 or more prisoners since the number above was based on 2007 data.

Roughly 30,000,000 people are looking for work, underutilized or just don't have a need to work. Then there are the 90,000,000 children that depend on someone to take care of them.

The United States Government spends quadruple the amount of money that it brings in and that's why the debt is growing at an enormous rate. Future generations of Americans will have it very hard unless we stand up and demand more like living wage jobs, smaller government and to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

The numbers may not be completely accurate; however, I believe that the numbers are even higher than what is reported by the sources.

Just think what it cost's every morning for your feet to hit the floor? Just a little statistics, that mean something for the long term future of America.

Sources:
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/Great_Recession_of_20072009.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/02/record.prison.population/index.html