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Posted on 05/11/2005 3:55:44 AM PDT by The Great Yazoo
Ministers Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Washington, D.C.'s Mayor Anthony Williams and others recently met to discuss plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October 1995 Million Man March. Whilst reading about the plans, I thought of an excellent topic for the event: how not to be poor.
Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there's a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.
Most jobs start with wages higher than the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15. A man and his wife, even earning the minimum wage, would earn $21,000 annually. According to the Bureau of Census, in 2003, the poverty threshold for one person was $9,393, for a two-person household it was $12,015, and for a family of four it was $18,810. Taking a minimum-wage job is no great shakes, but it produces an income higher than the Bureau of Census' poverty threshold. Plus, having a job in the first place increases one's prospects for a better job.
The Children's Defense Fund and civil rights organizations frequently whine about the number of black children living in poverty. In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it's welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor.
How much does racial discrimination explain? So far as black poverty is concerned, I'd say little or nothing, which is not to say that every vestige of racial discrimination has been eliminated. But let's pose a few questions. Is it racial discrimination that stops black students from studying and completing high school? Is it racial discrimination that's responsible for the 68 percent illegitimacy rate among blacks?
The 1999 Bureau of Census report might raise another racial discrimination question. Among black households that included a married couple, over 50 percent were middle class earning above $50,000, and 26 percent earned more than $75,000. How in the world did these black families manage not to be poor? Did America's racists cut them some slack?
The civil rights struggle is over, and it has been won. At one time, black Americans did not have the same constitutional protections as whites. Now, we do, because the civil rights struggle is over and won is not the same as saying that there are not major problems for a large segment of the black community. What it does say is that they're not civil rights problems, and to act as if they are leads to a serious misallocation of resources.
Rotten education is a severe handicap to upward mobility, but is it a civil rights problem? Let's look at it. Washington, D.C. public schools, as well as many other big city schools, are little more than educational cesspools. Per student spending in Washington, D.C., is just about the highest in the nation. D.C.'s mayors have been black, and so have a large percentage of the city council, school principals, teachers and superintendents. Suggesting that racial discrimination plays any part in Washington, D.C.'s educational calamity is near madness and diverts attention away from possible solutions.
Bill Cosby had the courage to speak out against individual irresponsibility. Surely those who profess to have the best interests of blacks at heart should be able to summon the courage to do so as well.
©2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
I can never figure out if Walter E. Williams is the smartest man in the world or if it's Thomas Sowell, but I'm pretty convinced it's one of the two. I particularly enjoy Williams' columns, and he is my favorite of Rush fill-ins.
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
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Bump for a good read.
He's the only EIB guest host that I can listen to AT ALL.
One attraction of his Rush fill-ins is that Thomas Sowell often appears.
Thomas Sowell is America's greatest living intellectual, but Walter Williams is a more accessible journalist.
If you're making a list, it better include those two gentlemen.
Good read.
It is sure that they are smart, educated folk, but to say they may be the smartest is probably just racial pandering.
They are consistently willing to state the obvious, and that is why most of us love them. That they are black, is why they are celebrated, by us conservatives, in the light of JJ, Rev Al, etal...
I have my own pick for smartest, but he probably isn't... he just acts like it!
I can truly say that I love to hear and read comments made by Walter E. Williams. His common sense and logic hits the nail right on the head every time and does so with so very few words.
Sure is a marked contrast to Michael Eric Dyson (who has a new book out trashing Cosby's comments).
Dyson is slated to do a book interview on C-SPAM2 Sunday at 9 pm.
I see. Noted.
Explain to me how this is racial pandering. It might be exaggeration for effect - maybe - but their race has nothing to do with it. My opinion is that as economists writing about public policy they have no peers - particularly Sowell in the arena of education. You're certainly free to disagree with me, but that's just an absurd accusation.
If we're using "smartest" as a shorthand term to praise a person's intellectual output, Thomas Sowell would have to be included irrespective of his race. I don't find Mr. Williams' work to be comparably original and deep, although he is certainly a solid economist and a clever writer and speaker.
Milton Friedman is often compared to Thomas Sowell, which makes sense, since he is Dr. Sowell's intellectual mentor. Judge Robert Bork is also a great and productive mind. Others could be named (but I need more coffee).
You're predicament is not half as bad as Hillary's when she discovered that not only is she not the smartest woman in the world... but that the smartest woman in the world is closer to the WhiteHouse and to being president than Hillary is.
My wife isn't running for president.
LOL! It's amazing, really, how many people who consider themselves intelligent, and who have (if nothing else) many years of higher education, are still unable to assimilate the dazzlingly obvious facts presented in Mr. Williams' column.
Black by popular demand ping.
Best advice I ever heard was from Ed Beckley, one of the original TV real estate hucksters. He said, "If you don't want to be poor, go out and look at what the poor people do. Then don't do it! it's so simple!"
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