Black Unemployment: Not Just a Disgrace, a Sin

Townhall.com ^ | January 14, 2014 | John Ransom

[Kaslin]

Even liberals get it.

Obama’s not just a dud, but a failure.

It’s not so much that he hasn’t lived to up to the hype as Messiah, as he hasn’t lived up to ordinary expectations for a fallible, human president.

When I rack up the score on all of the things Obama’s been wrong about, it’s hard to credit that my Democrat friends ever touted him as a “genius”.

If this is genius, it’s clearly not of the political type. Or the foreign policy type. Or the economic type.

Six years into the Great Recession and the labor market hasn’t improved much, as even liberals are now conceding.

The government has created more money than ever before, and while it’s making some people wealthy, it’s not creating jobs, especially not in the Black community, and especially not amongst black males.

Supposedly the “genius” did this on purpose. Or he didn’t.

“Blacks disproportionately left the labor market,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal economic outfit, “with the labor force participation rate for African Americans dropping by 0.3 percentage points to 60.2 percent, it’s lowest rate since December of 1977. The rate for African American men fell 0.7 percent to 65.6 percent, the lowest on record.”

Whoever else Obama may have benefited, it’s clear that black males haven’t been high on the priority list for him.

African Americans currently have an unemployment rate of 11.9 on the topline official stats. That’s double the rate of unemployment for women over the age of 20, and close to double the male unemployment rate for males aged 20 and over, which came in at 6.3 percent.

And even those numbers are much worse than it seems.

“The share of the working-age population with a job did not increase in December,” said Heidi Shierholz of the union controlled Economic Policy Institute “and the labor force participation rate dropped back down to its lowest point in 35 years. The number of‘missing workers’ increased from 5.6 million to 6 million. If these workers were in the labor force looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 10.2 percent instead of 6.7 percent.”

If you impute the same math to the Black community, unemployment for African-Americans comes in at 18.1 percent. That’s nearly one-in-five blacks without jobs today.

But the news gets worse even than that.

“In 2010, the incarceration rate for white men under local, state and federal jurisdiction was 678 inmates per 100,000 white U.S. residents,” says Pew Research, “for black men, it was 4,347. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black men were more than six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated in 2010.”

We don’t have numbers for 2011, 2012 and 2013.

But it’s not hard to figure that nothing plus nothing equals nothing.

Gays, check.

Whacko environmentalists, check.

Gun control nuts, check.

Radical, social theorists, check.

These are all interest groups that Obama has spent considerable political capital on.

God forbid that Obama should strain himself to propose something constructive to address the destruction going on in neighborhoods he has lived in and that’s directed mostly at black males.

There isn’t a more disenfranchised group in America than black males and Obama’s done very little to reverse that.

While marriage is down about a third amongst whites since 1960, it’s been cut in half in the black community, to 31 percent of black adults.

Guess what is the single biggest marker for poverty in the United States?

Being a single mother. And that trend has inordinately affected the black community.

While liberals like Obama do everything they can to provide aid and assistance to gay couples to get married, heterosexual black families get the back of the hand.

The result is poverty.

We know that there's a strong correlation between the composition of households and poverty. Households that lack two parents are many times more likely to live in poverty than those with two parents.

I’ve been optimistic that someone, somewhere in America will do something to address the crisis amongst black males in our community.

What we need is a touch of creativity here.

Republicans, Democrats, Bueller, Bueller, helllooooo?

It’s more than disgrace.

It is in fact a sin.

But don’t bother Obama about it.

He doesn’t want to know.

[driftless2]

There ‘s a lot to your argument. A very high percentage of Dems feel the system has wronged them. Not only black Americans, but certainly a very high pct. of blacks feel that way. Obama was supposed to right all those wrongs. How he was supposed to do that other than outright theft (which I’m sure they’d support), I don’t know. Obviously, Obama would like to do so, but can’t figure out a semi-legal way to rob most producers and “redistribute” to the faithful. But not for lack of trying.

[Kenny Bunk]

The Black Misery Index is just another reason America must undergo profound change.
Obama is never responsible for negative outcomes.

You gets it, my brother! Man be keepin' us down!

[econjack]

Obama is only doing what he said he would do, what he was voted in to do.

Really? So this is the "...most open administration since the founding of the Republic"? Committee hearings "...will all be open to the public". If he's doing what he's been voted in to do, why did he threaten us today with the use of Executive Orders to get his agenda through Congress, in total disregard to the electorate. Those who sit in both Houses were also elected, you know. If you think he is doing what he said he would do, I think you need to go back and review what he promised to do.

As to the electorate, unfortunately most have the IQ of broccoli and have no more a clue about economic policy than does Obozo. Not only would I like to see a "paid tax test" for voting, I wouldn't mind a current events test, too.

[CorporateStepsister]

You know, it’s wrong that the US is stuck catering to these people and we have to put up with the asinine lunacy that somehow some phantom ‘system’ is always to blame. It’s not just irritating, but it’s a drag and tiring. It’s like being married to a never ending critical spouse and nonstop pushing. It’s not like we can just split unfortunately, we’re stuck with the endless critic.

[CorporateStepsister]

It was all in his autobiography. We could see with our own eyes his intention to do what he’s doing right now.

[Brad from Tennessee]

African Americans vote in a bloc and they vote Democrat. The Democrats keep them in a state of victim-hood, anger and despair. They buy off black leaders and institute policies that insure dependency. All this allows people like Obama to take blacks for granted, which he does.