For starters, how about, instead of 60% of the working age population working 40 hours to make ends meet, (with the other 40% mooching off them, through welfare, family members supporting eachother, etc), how about 80% of the population working 30 hours a week?
It would create the same amount of wealth, but would distribute it a little differently.
It says the "working age population" which is everybody over 16, was 243 million in 2013, while the labor force was 156 million, leaving 87 million or about 36%.
Of those 87 million, - 9 million were probably in high school - 21 million were in college - 40 million were over 65 - 2+ million were incarcerated - ~20 million were disabled and cannot work (estimated 8% of the population)
That adds up to 92 million; obviously some of those older and younger people are in fact working.
See: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul...
and
https://disabilitycompendium.org/sites/default/files/user-up...
You'll also find a lot of the remaining employed people to be significantly under-employed, compared to people doing 40+ hours/week.
[1] 40% of undergraduate students, and 76% of graduate students have >30 hours of work/week. [2][3]
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/at-univ...
[3] So, instead of subtracting 20 million from the unemployed bucket, we need to subtract ~10 million from the employed bucket, and ~10 million from the unemployed bucket. Repeat this process for high school students, persons with disabilities (Some of whom do, in fact, work), and seniors, and you will get to something more resembling a 6:4 ratio.
And the 20 million disabled people figure is not the total number of disabled people; it's the fraction that don't work multiplied by the fraction who are disabled multiplied by the workforce number. The second reference is where I got the fractions.
My suspicion is that those remaining 40% are significantly less employable, and you can't just swap them in like a fungible good. I suspect also that as technical skills become more valuable - and our education system remains stagnant - that 40% number will grow.
I'd sooner see investment in apprenticeship programs and other efforts to reduce the "mooching" as you called it, than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone. How does me doing less work enable that? There's not a fixed supply of "work that can be done", by any stretch.
It's because I'm not trying to increase the amount of crap we produce. I simply postulate that we could get the same work done, by a better distribution of labour. Whether or not we need to produce more is another question entirely.
> than somehow thinking that having me work ten hours less a week is going to provide anything for anyone.
Take three people in your position, and you'll create a job for a fourth. And, after all, in our society, job creation is some holy grail that we need to bend over backwards on laws, regulations, and smart business sense for. Instead of compromising on those things, why not compromise on 'normal' working hours, instead?
i'd implore you to compare regular people welfare spending to corporate welfare spending if this is the view you hold
Just allow the situation to resolve itself?