Reparations: Obama Had It Right!
In a podcast interview – wait for it – with Bruce Springsteen… hold on – I’m laughing so hard I can’t type right now …
Okay – I’m back, in a podcast interview with Bruce Springsteen…. LOL, haha .. hold on ..
In a podcast interview with Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama is “all in” on reparations all of the sudden. During his Presidency he was much more conservative on the issue, but in this hard hitting piece by (haaaaa) Bruce Springsteen, Obama reverses his former position and doubles down using the race card saying the policy never came up during his time in office because of the politics of “white resistance.” Of course, don’t do the hard work of debate and persuasion, just blame it on whites.
In fact, Obama had it right when he was President, and he reminds Ta-Nehisi Coates what his administration thought about reparations. In a 2016 interview in the The Atlantic, Obama says, “Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps [Income, Wealth, Education]. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps.”
Obama completed his position and said, “The bottom line is that it’s hard to find a model in which you can practically administer and sustain political support for those kinds of efforts. And what makes America complicated as well is the degree to which this is not just a black/white society, and it is becoming less so every year. So how do Latinos feel if there’s a big investment just in the African American community, and they’re looking around and saying, “We’re poor as well. What kind of help are we getting?” Or Asian Americans who say, “Look, I’m a first-generation immigrant, and clearly I didn’t have anything to do with what was taking place.” And now you start getting into trying to calibrate.”
So what was Obama’s plan over the 8 years of his Presidency to close the Income, Wealth, and Education gaps for black Americans? According to Obama, it’s a three legged stool. Coates starts by asserting Obama’s viewpoint that “[your] perspective is that a mixture of universalist policies, in combination with an increased level of personal responsibility and communal responsibility among African Americans, when we talk about these gaps that we see between black and white America, that that really is the way forward.” Obama agrees and adds, “vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws … As a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans. They also have the benefit of being sellable to a majority of the body politic.”
Finally, leg #3, “If you’ve got those two things right—if those two things are happening—then a third leg of the stool is, how do we in the African American community build a culture in which we are saying to our kids, “Here’s what it takes to succeed. Here’s the sacrifices you need to make to be able to get ahead. Here’s how we support each other. Here’s how we look out for each other.” And it is my view that if society was doing the right thing with respect to you, [and there were] programs targeted at helping people rise into the middle class and have a good income and be able to save and send their kids to school, and you’ve got a vigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, then I have confidence in the black community’s capabilities to then move forward.”
Bayard Rustin was an American black activist that was active as early as 1941 advocating for the end of racial discrimination, long before Martin Luther King Jr., but also worked alongside MLK – he too advocated for a “Marshall Plan” for the liquidation of poverty in the black community. Rustin, King and A. Philip Randolph developed an 84 page budget called the Freedom Budget designed to close these gaps. Much of what was in those pages were also proposed by Obama during his Presidency.
Unfortunately, these guys had a focus on increasing the minimum wage, or the establishment of a “living wage.” Most economists suggest the minimum wage is bad policy for the poor. Thomas Sowell, Economist and Senior Fellow at Stanford University, said it best, “Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 – all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The NIRA raised wages in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs.”
Milton Friedman, Nobel prize winning economist once wrote, “Women, teenagers, Negroes and particularly Negro teenagers, will be especially hard hit. I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books—in its effect not its intent. Before 1956, unemployment among Negro boys aged 14 to 19 was around 8 to 11%, about the same as among white boys. Within two years after the legal minimum was raised from 75 cents to $1 an hour in 1956, unemployment among Negro boys shot up to 24% and among white boys to 14%. Both figures have remained roughly the same ever since. But I am convinced that, when it becomes effective, the $1.60 minimum wage will increase unemployment among Negro boys to 30% or more.”
Friedman concluded, “Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor. These people confuse wage rates with wage income. It has always been a mystery to me to understand why a youngster is better off unemployed at $1.60 an hour than employed at $1.25.”
Finally, Michelle and Barrack Obama said they would never put their kids in DC Public Schools, instead they put them in private schools. Obama said, “D.C. schools are not on par with Sidwell (private school who’s alumnae include Chelsea Clinton and Trisha Nixon).” “My Daughters’ private education is better than the public options, he says.” Essentially going on to conclude when asked on the Today Show whether Malia and Sasha “would get the same kind of education at a D.C. public school” as at their high-priced private school, the Obama’s asserted “they would not.”
Like so many black leaders before him, Obama prescribed a rigorous plan for the black community. Close the gaps by supporting and asserting personal responsibility and communal responsibility, impose a fierce policy of antidiscrimination, and create programs to educate and lift the black community out of poverty. He knew the DC public schools were a wretched place, yet nothing was done to improve the public school system right in his back yard let alone inner city public schools across the country. He even tried ending the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, a program designed to give funding to families wishing to move thier student out of the DC public school system to a private school of their choice. Essentially he broke all three legs of his stool by trying to end just this one program. Trump reinstated the voucher program, but will Biden once again end it? That was then- lots of creative and effective lip service to the poor, but now REPARATIONS!
Obama is such a well respected politician by those across all incomes, races, sexes, even among Republicans – why not use that power to push policy to move public schools into a competitive position with private schools? School choice is a proven method – just look at the graduation rates of students that left the public school system via a voucher program to attend a private school or another school of their choice, like a charter school. Testing scores, as well – it’s night and day. More money for education isn’t the answer either – some estimates have the cost per student near $29,000 in the DC public school system. That’s nearly three times the national average. You can’t get a proper education for that kind of money?
Instead he would rather talk to Bruce Springsteen, of all people, about racism and reparations. Really? That’s all you got?
