In "Please Stop Helping Us," Jason Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.
Between 1940 and 1960 before the Great Society programs and the voting act, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent -- the black poverty rate fell from 87% to 47%. Yet between 1972 and 2011 the implementation of Great Society programs -- it barely declined, from 32% to 28%, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972. Drug offenses are not driving the incarceration rate--violent crime is. It's a red herring to claim it's drugs. When everyone from the president (Obama) on down buy into the Black Lives Matter myth of cops killing young black men, we'll never be able make headway, and the solutions won't come from Washington, but from black people. (paraphrase) Affirmative action and quotas helped primarily the black middle class, not the underclass--it actually lost ground. (paraphrase).
The civil rights movement has become an industry. Liberalism has succeeded in convincing blacks to see themselves as victims.
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