They don’t start businesses as much as they once did. They don’t spend time outdoors as they once did. And they live in a society that tells them everything will hurt them. The facts are true. American’s have become lazier, and we are teaching a future generation to be lazy.



Many of you were like me. You grew up working even at a young age. We have however lost this. Just look at how people bring up children today. Often they won’t even let children go outside. One contributing factor to the growing laziness in America is found in the kids.







Today’s Kids and Playing Outside



Do you remember playing outside, all day? I do. We played in creeks and in the woods. Children today spend less time outdoors than any other generation, devoting only four to seven minutes to unstructured outdoor play per day. Kids are spending an average of seven and a half hours in front of electronic media.



Just based on this information alone we can see why kids are becoming lazy. Elected officials constantly tell us about an obesity problem with kids. Maybe some outdoor play would help with this problem.



Safety, not Play



According to a report from 2017 from CNN, all of this is causing the U.S. to stagnate economically and politically.



Tyler Cowen says in his new book: “The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.” Growth is far slower than it was in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and productivity growth is way down, despite everyone claiming they are working so hard.



One chance we may see is that our past generations didn’t talk about how hard they work, they showed it. The work we do today is far less overall than what they did. Most men in the area I grew up in would work a full-time job, then come home and farm.



“Innovation is painful. That’s why we don’t do more of it,” Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, told CNNMoney. His book makes the case that all of the upheavals of the 1960s and 70s caused people to strive for safety and the status quo in the decades after that.



Government Handouts



Another contributor to the issue of laziness is government handouts. In 2018 a total of $851 billion is projected to be spent on welfare programs in America. From 1965 to 2011 the total percentage of GDP spent on welfare programs has quadrupled from .83 percent to 4.4 percent of the total.



Safety that has changed how we work. If you remove hard work from just one generation, it follows in the future generations. This coupled with kids who do not play outside we can see why we have a laziness problem.



A Current Reset on Laziness



There has been one reset on these statistics. Enter Donald Trump. President Trump has hit the reset button on bringing back jobs that President Obama said would never come back. The jobs that require not a college degree, but hard work. Jobs like welding, mining, and technical skills. The jobs that made America great.



The Department of Agriculture, which runs the food stamp program,