America’s first black President was hardly a boon for the black community. In fact, compare Barack Obama against a conservative icon like Ronald Reagan, and there’s no comparison. Even the liberal commentator Tavis Smiley had to admit as much when Obama left office. He said: “Sadly — and it pains me to say this — over the last decade, black folk, in the era of Obama, have lost ground in every major economic category.”
And indeed they have – whether you look at unemployment rates, labor force participation rates, wages, welfare uses, and more. To summarize, under Obama’s watch:
- The seasonally adjusted labor-force-participation rate for black Americans across the board has slipped from 63.2 percent to 61.7 percent — down 2.4 percent.
- The percentage of black Americans struggling below the poverty line has advanced, according to the most recent Census Bureau data, from 25.8 in 2009 to 26.2 in 2014 — up 1.6 percent.
- Real median income among black households during those years, according to the Census Bureau, sank from $35,954 to $35,398 — down 1.5 percent.
- The number of black food-stamp participants exploded across that time frame from 7,393,000 to 11,699,000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports — up 58.2 percent.
And that’s finally begun to change!
According to the Daily Signal,
In Friday’s jobs report, black unemployment reached a record low: 6.8 percent. That’s the lowest black unemployment has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unemployment, which started in 1972. “The lowest in nearly 5 decades and a credit to [President Donald Trump’s] economic policies!!” tweeted White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsThe_QAe8A
Trump also tweeted out the news:
The African American unemployment rate fell to 6.8%, the lowest rate in 45 years. I am so happy about this News! And, in the Washington Post (of all places), headline states, “Trumps first year jobs numbers were very, very good.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
It’s a little known secret that liberal policies, not a “racist society,” are to blame for the historically higher black unemployment rate (relative to white unemployment). As the great Thomas Sowell summarized in his book “Basic Economics,” ” From the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable as the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930.”
We’ve had a president before who understood that, by the way…
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