Sen. Marco Rubio's Report on the Working (and Non-Working) Man

A new report from Sen. Rubio provides recommendations on men and work that make eminent sense.

For Labor Day, Sen. Marco Rubio’s office issued a report on “The State of the Working (and Non-Working) Man.” I thought it was very interesting and wanted to highlight parts of it.

The first section describes the challenges men are facing today, summarizing things that most of you have probably already read about:

From the schoolhouse to the workforce, boys and men are falling behind and failing to live up to their potential—especially in comparison to girls and women, who have notched impressive gains across the board. The gap emerges as early as grade school, where boys underperform girls in English and math in virtually every state. The problem continues in high school, where boys are less likely to graduate on time. The problem is perhaps most visible on college campuses, where there is now a larger gender gap in awarded bachelor’s degrees favoring females than there was favoring males in 1972. Most medical and law students are now women; only in business schools do men retain an edge in professional degrees, and even that advantage is dwindling. The problem has gotten so bad that some colleges have begun practicing affirmative action for men.

The report focuses on prime working age men who are neither working nor in school. This echoes the argument that economist Ed Glaeser made that we should focus particularly on joblessness rather than income inequality, because the social results for men who are not working are so grim.

Male non-work is associated with many other forms of pathology. The economist Alan Kreuger found that prime-age men who are not in the labor force report feeling sad and purposeless at much higher rates than men with jobs. They are isolated, spending more than 50 percent more time alone each day than those who are working. In all, nonworking adult men spend about one-third of their waking hours in isolation. More than two-thirds have never married. Close to a third live with their parents. Nearly half take painkillers every day. And they are more likely to take their own lives. Men are the victims in three-quarters of so-called “deaths of despair,” or deaths attributable to suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol poisoning. Adults out of the labor force are at much higher risk of dying in those ways, with twice the risk of suicide and a staggering seven times the risk of accidental poisoning.

These statistics paint a bleak portrait of life for the millions of men without work in this country. Devoid of purpose, they are sinking into a morass of dissolution and self-destruction. The situation is better for working men, but they face a crisis of their own: their outcomes and prospects in work, education, and family life are dimmer than their fathers’, and growing dimmer still. The days of the prosperous yeoman are no more. America’s men face an economy and society that no longer reward their efforts the way they once did, and in some cases are hostile to them.

The report then goes through a number of possible factors that have contributed to this state of affairs, including deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy, the prioritization of college over other career pathways, mass immigration, the welfare and disability trap, and a cultural and technological revolution.

It is interesting to see how Sen. Rubio’s views on immigration have evolved, as he was originally one of the “Gang of Eight” promoting an immigration reform solution viewed as soft by many Republican voters. This report, however, is forthright about the impact of large scale immigration on lower skilled domestic workers.

The proposed solutions section is of most interest to me. Rubio supports working to reindustrialize America. The report wisely avoided over-promising what this can deliver, saying, “Efforts to make American industry competitive, while important, are not a panacea, and their limitations should be noted.” It also points out the way that some legislation and policies around reindustialization are hobbled by attempts to use them to advance extraneous, and typically progressive, goals. The report highlights the Biden administration’s desire to use these programs to promote more female workers on construction projects, for example, which I think is a good example of how the policy apparatus of government and much of the rest of the institutional landscape is explicitly about advancing female specific interests. While reindustrialization is not a panacea, it is important and worth pursuing in certain sectors. This is important to both national security and employment (particularly for men as this report notes).

I think a lot of the discussion around deindustalization in America misses important dimensions of the problem. In particular, in terms of “creative destruction” it focuses on the destruction rather than the creation. For example, we’re told that it’s automation not trade that has accounted for the vast majority of manufacturing job losses. I have read that contractors for Apple alone employ 700,000 people in China. Apple itself claims to support five million jobs in China. Let’s use the lower figure. Were these 700,000 jobs supporting just one US company a) jobs lost to trade, b) jobs lost to automation, or c) jobs that count in some other bucket we never talk about? It’s not just about the jobs that were lost, but the jobs that were never created here in the first place. Deindustrialization and offshoring were vastly more consequential than we think.

The report also calls for increasing federal support for “protector” professions like policing that have a male employment skew. It suggests expanding the size of the Border Patrol, for example, which makes eminent sense given the state of our southern border. And it rightly links the recruiting shortfall in the military not just to male employment, but also national security. In addition to greater resourcing, the call is also to stop demonizing these professions such as through defund the police rhetoric.

The report also lists an array of specific reforms to federal programs with embedded marriage penalties, or those that penalize families with a non-working spouse. For example, the child care tax credit is only available if both spouses work. It also calls for more flexible work arrangements such as allowing a husband and wife to “pull forward up to six months of combined Social Security benefits when they welcome a new child into the world. The couple would be able to decide how to apportion that time away from work between the two of them.” The EITC and SNAP (food stamps) programs are among those with significant marriage penalties that should be eliminated.

One thing I would add is to look at new benefits that would be channeled to married middle class families. We have an array of federal programs that help the poor and which are designed to benefit single mothers. We should also be rewarding married families. I would suggest looking to add more non-refundable tax credits to accomplish this. This rewards work without creating a welfare benefit. And it would skew towards married couples without penalizing those who are single.

The report also proposes miscellaneous other reforms, such as pushing high schools to offer the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery test, and to encourage more single sex education.

Lastly, while recognizing the challenges men face, this report also wisely avoids treating them purely as victims. It wants to put an expectation that men will work, such as by making it more difficult for able bodied men to collect public benefits without at least actively looking for work. I would agree that this should be a baseline expectation.

What I like about this is that there are a number of proposals that are specific enough to be actually implemented in legislation. As a Senator, Marco Rubio rightly focuses on those things that can be done through federal legislation. Many of these are no brainers and should be passed rapidly. But of course this is America 2023 so don’t hold your breath.

Download the full report at: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/09.05.23-Labor-Day-Report-vf-PWR.pdf