African-Americans families have been losing savings, property, and wealth for thirty years, and will reach a median wealth of zero in 26 years, predicts a new study by left-wing groups.
“By 2024, median Black and Latino households are projected to own 60-80% less wealth than they did in 1983,” said the study, titled “The Road to Zero Wealth.” It continued:
Median Black household wealth is on a path to hit zero by 2053 … [and] median Latino household wealth is projected to hit zero twenty years later, or by 2073.
Median is the mid-point, not the average. So the median wealth will hit zero when one-half of the African-American population has no wealth, even if the other half remains prosperous. Wealth includes the value of savings, possessions, cars, and real-estate, minus debt. Annual income is counted separately, and if saved or invested, it can grow wealth.
The report was prepared by left-wing groups who blamed racial discrimination by the federal government for the shocking reversal of progress among Africans Americans since 1983. The groups are the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now.
“The growing racial wealth divide documented in this report is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the result of contemporary and historical public policies that were intentionally or thoughtlessly designed to help White households get ahead at the expense and exclusion of households of color,” it claims.
To create this “people of color vs. people of pallor” racial conflict, the authors choose to treat all Americans who are white as just a unified and uniform mass of whiteness. That racial stereotyping hides the real cause and scale of economic damage to blue-collar and white-collar Americans families amid the rising wealth of the technocratic globalized elite which dominates the Democratic Party and at least half of the GOP.
Despite the authors’ racialist worldview, the economic details in the report remain shocking and highlight the overall failure of federal policies since the 1970s to raise the income and wealth of ordinary Americans who are outside the technocratic, high-IQ, post-graduate elite.
That government failure is exemplified by the housing bubble, which destroyed a huge percentage of wealth held by African-Americans.
A 2011 report by the Pew Research Center showed that the median wealth of Africans-American households dropped by 53 percent because of the property bubble. The mid-point median of African-American wealth crashed from $12,124 in 2005 to just $5,677 in 2009, according to the Pew report.
This housing disaster was caused by a bipartisan federal effort to aid minorities, not to damage minorities. In fact, former President Barack Obama worked briefly as a housing lawyer in Chicago before being elected to the federal Senate in 2006. Many of his poorly-paid African-American clients lost their overpriced homes in the 200os, but Obama continued to defend the housing-bubble policies during his tenure as president.
Latinos suffered a greater 66 percent decline in median wealth because the federal government pushed them to buy houses during the bubble. President George. W. Bush led that effort because he was trying to win votes from the growing bloc of immigrant Latinos.
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Subsequently, Bush admitted that his government’s pro-Latino policy was part of the problem. Latinos’ median household wealth dropped from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 by 2009.
Whites suffered far less from the bubble because many had already paid off their mortgages, because their debts were a small percentage of their income, and because whites had more assets in the stock market and other sectors outside the housing market. Still, the median wealth of white households also dropped by a huge 16 percent, from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.
Meanwhile, wages for all men have remained flat for the past 44 years since 1973, according to the Census Bureau.
Amid the economic disaster, the globalized elite merely got richer and more powerful. For example, when Obama settled into the White House during the housing implosion, his economic policies helped very clever people invest their way back up to more wealth. The New York Post described the process:
The years 2008 through 2015 should be known as the Great Fleecing.
During that time, the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world occurred. Some $4.5 trillion was given to Wall Street banks through its Quantitative Easing program, with the American people picking up the IOU … Who did this help? The 1%, and pretty much only the 1%.
The zero median wealth report ignores the inevitable crony-capitalist collusion of the intermarried peers in the political and business elite as the report tries to prove white supremacy in economic policy.
It offers 87 mentions of “African-American” or “black,” 99 mentions of “white,” and 60 mentions of “Latino,” but no mention of Obama nor Bush. The report does not discuss how technology is concentrating wealth among higher-skilled people, and it omits any talk of globalized outsourcing. It also avoids family stability and it ignores the topic of immigration, which has flooded the nation’s marketplace with cheap labor that effectively imposes a 5 percent tax on labor — and then transfers $500 billion a year to company owners and investors.
Instead, like an academic adding up “intersectionality” grievance points, the report blames’ African-Americans’ lower wealth on constitutional protection for slavery until the Civil War, discrimination against African-American farmer until about 2000, and the mortgage “redlining” which curbed bank lending to African-Americans from 1935s to the 1970s.
It blames lower Latino wages on the U.S. takeover of Texas and California from Mexico, the 1994 NAFTA law which exported jobs back to Mexico, the 1943 bracero guest-worker program which provided jobs to Mexicans, and the quotas in 1965 immigration act which allowed at least 10 million Mexicans into the United States.
Without any useful focus on policy or even the law of supply and demand, the report then lists a series of unrealistic demands, including a massive tax increase on the wealthy, a massive financial grant to children that could be spent when they become adults, more house-buying aid for poor people, a higher minimum wage, and “a federal jobs guarantee [that] would function similarly to the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s.”
The report downplays personal responsibility, and because of report’s minority vs. white angle, it inadvertently suggests that African-Americans and Latinos are not as responsible as whites when buying damaged houses when it urges the racial wealth disparity be reduced by more housing regulations:
Under a CFD [“contract for deed”] arrangement, the buyer has all of the responsibilities and headaches of a homeowner, including making repairs, paying property taxes and securing insurance, without actually owning anything. These buyers have even fewer rights than the typical renter, who can at least call the landlord to fix a busted toilet or broken lock.
To mitigate the risk for abuse associated with these transactions, state laws should ensure that until buyers have all the rights of homeownership, they at least have the protections afforded to tenants … It is unfair that a buyer who doesn’t even hold the deed to a property is saddled with the responsibility of expensive repairs. This reform would eliminate one of the driving forces behind Wall Street firms pushing land contracts—the ability to manipulate low-income buyers into providing an income stream to investors while shouldering all the burdens of home repairs.
But many people of all colors who cannot get through college are falling behind because technology, work, and business are becoming more complex. This increasing complexity ensures that an increasing share of income and wealth goes to people who are smart enough to arbitrage the increasing social and technological diversity, regardless of color.
The authors’ focus on racial disparities also hid the impact of cheap-labor immigration, which is already a no-go zone for leftist intellectuals because the Democratic elite prefers to import foreign voters rather than accept the equal social status of all blue-collar Americans.
Breitbart News asked the authors why they ignored the huge economic and civic damage wrought by cheap-labor immigration. Sean Luechtefeld, a deputy communications director for Prosperity Now, responded by saying that opposition to large-scale immigration will just make the problem worse:
My colleague, Emanuel [Nieves], forwarded me your request. Prosperity Now and IPS appreciate your interest in covering the report, but unfortunately we must respectfully decline to comment because we disagree with the premise of your claim.
We did not include reducing legal immigration as a solution to bridge the racial wealth divide because we’ve seen no evidence that doing so would close the racial wealth divide or improve the overall economic conditions of working families. Moreover, evidence abounds that the opposite is true—that when we actively work to exclude immigrant communities, we not only stifle immigrants’ chances of getting ahead, but we create even more significant economic hardships that we simply cannot afford.
That said, the report does point to a number of solutions that would have a significant impact on closing the racial wealth divide, including shifting our tax expenditures to serve the needs of low-income people rather than the wealthy and investing in Children’s Savings Accounts, among others.
In reality, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.
The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.
That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.
Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades:
