A main reason for unemployment is that people's bad choices have caught up with them

Ok, boomer.

you seem to have a full understanding the on the complexities of job creation and the intricacies of how the economy operates

This is an odd thread considering that unemployment is now at a 50-year low.

That's not even a factor. There is something out there for every person.
Some give up, some don't.

Swear to everything, I have made a damn good living before, going out in the woods collecting different kinds of moss and wild flowers. Diving in the river for mussels, still watching for that good job to come along, and then using that to go into business for myself.
Your only limits, are your own.

Don’t you shovel coal?

From what I hear from my manager friends, they have trouble filling job openings because so many people can't pass a drug test.

Due to lack of hirable people, my well- paying corporate job is becoming more stressful by the day, and I am now fantasizing about just going back to delivering pizzas or slinging cheesesteaks at Philly Connection.

Think it's bad now? Going to be a lot worse in the future where you have these kids making money as 'social media influencers' or 'youtube personalities' with no marketable skills or experience. Only a small percentage of them make enough money to be set up for life.

Background checks knock a hell of a dent in the worker pool.

If you seriously believe this is the reason that so many jobs have become low wage you need to go back to school. Corporations buying corporations until there is little to no competition and then keeping wages low by conspiring and agreeing with the very few competitors that are out there to set a max amount of pay at each level of employment is the real answer. At the heart of this is the open and shamelessly corrupt act of bribing of politicians to approve mergers that should never have been approved but that's only the tip of the iceberg of the corrupt and unethical things that you can literally pay a politician to do. They have ingeniously labeled this 'lobbying' in order to avoid calling it what it really is which is outright bribery. At the end of the day this is all legal of course because guess who makes the laws? Whatever you do don't confuse what's legal with what's ethical and moral. It's incredibly depressing when people have to bust their arse at a 50+ hour a week low wage jobs just to barely make ends meet and often have to borrow money or pull out the credit card (same thing as borrowing money) to get through to the next payday and some people just give up because it's not worth it.

So agreed that bad choices can catch up to you, but to say that it's the primary reason for unemployment and low wages is ridiculous.