Young, bummed, and in debt.

• Author: de Rugy, Veronique
• Position: Columns - Labor market

The labor market looks bleak for millennials. Why aren't they angrier?

UNTIL RECENTLY, a bad job market was nearly always bad news for political incumbents. Unemployed and anxious voters have a habit of throwing the bums out. But headed into the 2016 election season, one large demographic group is still likely to vote Democratic: millennials.

Which is weird, because when it comes to the labor market, it sucks to be young. To be sure, it has always been hard to enter the workforce during a recession. But this recession has not only been particularly severe; it has been made longer and deeper than necessary by the Obama administration's policies. Washington's burdensome regulations, "stimulus" spending, and health insurance mandates have given us a slow recovery, high uncertainty, and a pathetic job market.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), some 1.2 million unemployed millennials with little or no job experience are trying to find jobs for the first time right now. Their unemployment rate is 12.2 percent, more than twice the rate for 25- to 54-year-olds. And if those first-time job seekers don't find employment soon, some of them may actually never work. "It is even more depressing," says my Mercatus Center colleague Keith Hall, a former BLS commissioner, "when you know that some 400,000 young long-term unemployed have never worked before." That's much higher than anything we have seen in the last 45 years.

It gets worse. In June testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs' subcommittee on economic policy, Hall explained that "job prospects have been so bad that many have withdrawn from the labor force and do not even show up in the official unemployment rate statistics." According to his calculations, some 2 million young workers are simply missing from the labor force, and "if not left uncounted in the official unemployment rate, these 2 million would raise the youth unemployment rate from its current 10.9 percent rate to 15.4 percent--well above their highest rate in over 65 years." Only 63.4 percent of youth aged 18 to 29 are employed today, a pathetic and alarming figure.

Teenagers face even more abysmal prospects. The unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-olds is 21 percent, down from its 27.3 percent peak in 2009 but up from 14.8 percent at the beginning of 1990.They are also more disengaged from the labor force than their slightly older peers, with a labor force participation rate of a...