Posted on 08/09/2016 8:48:53 AM PDT by EinNYC
The racial wealth gap is so wide it would take black families over two centuries to catch up to white families, a jaw-dropping new study found.
Unless public policy intervenes, black households wouldn’t amass the wealth of today's white households for another 228 years, according to research from the Corporation for Enterprise Development and the Institute for Policy Studies.
The findings are part of a study, called “The Ever-Growing Gap,” that examined the accumulation of wealth over the past 30 years and how wealth-building policies have disproportionately given white, already wealthy Americans a boost.
Over the past three decades, the average wealth of white families has grown by 84%, which is a staggering three times as fast as the rate for African-American families and 1.2 times the growth rate for Latino families.
At that rate, it would take until the year 2244 for the average black family to accumulate wealth that matches what white families have today.
“Even more unfortunate, the extreme rise in overall wealth inequality over the past three decades has only served to further compound and exacerbate this racial wealth divide,” the study reads.
The authors of the study suggest that racial economic disparities go hand in hand with the social unrest in communities of color and tensions with the criminal justice system.
“In the last decade, we have seen the catastrophic economic impact of the Great Recession and an ensuing recovery that has bypassed millions of Americans, especially households of color. This period of economic turmoil has been punctuated by civil unrest throughout the country in the wake of a series of high-profile African-American deaths at the hands of police,” the study reads.
The following are some of the study’s most startling findings:
*Decades of discriminatory housing policies and market practices have resulted in homeownership among only 41% of Black families and 45% of Hispanic families compared to 71% of white families; homeownership still remains one of the greatest sources of Americans’ wealth.
*The 400 richest Americans own more wealth than the entire black population, plus one-third of the Latino population combined
*Black Americans have higher average unemployment rates, at 8.6%, than white Americans, at 4.4%
*Latino and Black families are paid up to $20,000 less on average per year than white households
*Over two-thirds of Black and Hispanic households lack the savings necessary to subsist at the poverty level for three months, compared to only one-third of white households
*Wealth returns on a four-year degree is much for valuable for white graduates than it is for black and Hispanic graduates
The group who put together the study is calling on Congress to consider policy options to help close the gap in racial economic disparity and “reduce the wealth concentration at the top.”
This includes identifying policies that perpetuate the wealth divide through a government-wide audit, fixing tax policies to ensure they help families of color build wealth, and closing federal estate-tax loopholes and creating an annual net worth tax on high-wealth individuals.
“Given the trajectory of the racial wealth divide and the future demographics of our country, failure to address this growing problem will severely impact the economic opportunity of communities of color, and it will have serious ramifications for the overall economic well-being of our nation,” the study reads.
If you took all the money in the economy and gave it to the lower classes, it would be back in the same hands within a year. Even completely discounting the work ethic, the majority of people have no idea how to handle money.
Lyndon Johnson did a superb job, didn’t he?
The Great Society destroyed the black family structure, produced 75% bastard children, and made black people largely dependent on the fed gov.
So what have they got to lose?
It is not the same as wealth, but I know absolutely, positively that in less than one generation an ambitious black youngster from a poor family can have a salary, on average, equal to a slacker youngster from a rich family.
This is from a study attempting to show that it is more difficult for ambitious blacks to rise from poverty than it is for a rich slacker to fall from wealth.
The net result of the study was to show that a few percent of poor blacks, in spite of going to college, remained poor. And a few percent of rich slacker young people remained wealthy. But a huge percentage of ambitious blacks rose to incomes greater that the huge percentage of white slackers. In less than one generation.
Sorry, I didn’t bookmark the study and can’t find it. But it really did happen.
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