Obama's Insensitivity to Blacks?

What if I told you that a (gasp) White president has done more for Black people than our savior, Obama?

Well, I would first most likely be called a racist . Others would say that I am a Fox News Obama hater just saying nonsense. Then there are those who really don't give a damn.

I will speak to all three of you. I came across this brilliant article from the Cato Institute. This will pierce the proverbial bubble of the regular Obama drone.

Richard W. Rahn started his important article with this:

If you knew nothing else about President Obama other than looking at the data, you might conclude that he was insensitive to blacks, given that they have done far worse economically under his administration than Hispanics or whites. What is striking is that the president and his advisers still seem to be clueless about which economic policies work and which don’t work. 

Obama has made an effort to compare himself with former President Ronald Reagan and has done so in too many speeches. I won't supply all the links but you can perform a Google search to see the speeches. He should stop this though because it is so far beyond the truth. Unlike Reagan, Obama has failed in helping minorities especially Blacks. With an average of 93% of Black Americans voting for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, he had the confidence of the Black community that he would help them reach new levels of economic success. Sadly, the facts paint a more bleak picture and his laughable comparison to Reagan sheds the light on The Gipper's more impressive accomplishments for Black Americans.



Let's start with the first step of how to improve the lot of a group of people which are with taxes. Simple economics will teach you that how Government treats job creators will determine a healthy economy. In turn, a healthy economy that bolsters job creation will help minorities.

President Reagan reduced the maximum tax rate on job creators by 60 percent; Mr. Obama increased the maximum tax rate on job creators by 17 percent.

That's right. Obama has raised the tax rate on job creators while Reagan reduced the maximum tax rate by a stellar 60%.

Second step is federal spending. Under Obama, spending has only increased while Reagan cut non-defense spending by a third of the nation's GDP.

Third step is federal regulations that can often stifle business which in turn limits job creation for minorities. You guessed it. Obama has only increased regulations while Reagan cut them.

Moving on from the economic actions that differ from our current Progressive Fabian Socialist President and Ronald Reagan; let us delve into how exactly Black Americans did under Reagan as opposed to Obama. Through solid research by the Cato Institute, Rahn writes the following:

• Under Reagan, adult black unemployment fell by 20 percent, but under Mr. Obama, it has increased by 42 percent.
• Black teenage unemployment fell by 16 percent under Reagan, but has risen by 56 percent under Mr. Obama.
• The increase in unemployment rates has been far worse for blacks under Mr. Obama than for whites and Hispanics.
• Inflation-adjusted real incomes are slightly higher for Hispanics and whites than they were in 2008, but are lower for blacks.
• The labor force participation rate has fallen for all groups, but remains far lower for blacks than for whites and Hispanics.

Now, as you take in the facts above, I want you to ponder on how our President handles his failures. He not only dodges and reflects, but he also pushes his failed policies. He's like one of the crazy British generals in WWI who kept sending men over their desert trenches to certain death in Gallipoli. The policy was to keep charging and advancing against heavily entrenched Turks and their hundreds of machine guns. 

A failed policy is not a failed policy to the minds of extremists like Obama. The people he says he is standing for are hurting and not advancing.

Obama's failures are based on an erroneous theory that I discussed in a past blog called the Zero Sum Fallacy. Basically, it is the theory that in order for an individual to have success it must be off the back of another individual. Rahn delves into this and gives background below:

Adam Smith was one of the first to understand that as a result of new technologies and better political and business institutions and organizations — and, most important, the rule of law and proper incentives — everyone could become better off without taking anything from anyone else. Despite the empirical evidence of the past 200 years that Smith and all of the clear and rational thinkers who followed him were right about economic growth, there is still the widespread belief that for one person to prosper someone else needs to suffer. It is this mindset that serves as the basic rationale for socialism and the state as an instrument of income redistribution. One would think that only the uneducated still would have this mindset, but it is most prevalent in universities.

Obama, his drones, his Advisers, Progressive Statists, and especially the Academic Intelligentsia, are all of a different school of thought. Kahn further elaborates on America's educators and states they are

so dense when it comes to productivity increases and the resulting economic growth, and real rise in living standards is that most classrooms are not much more productive than they were when Aristotle was speaking to a dozen or so students 2,500 years ago. By contrast, entrepreneurs see better ways of producing more for less and visualize and create things that never existed (i.e., the automobile, the airplane, the iPad, etc.) — and they create wealth and jobs. Mr. Obama comes from the government/academic class rather than the entrepreneurial class and has a much more static view of the world.

The more static view of the world is anti economic, entrepreneurial, productivity, and wealth creation. Slow growth and stagnation are the current policies.

He wants you to believe he is like Reagan; but Reagan stood for the direct opposite policies that actually helped the poor and minorities. Kahn sums it most eloquently and effectively:

Reagan thought like an entrepreneur, and thus intuitively understood that economic growth creates opportunities for everyone — most important, for those who have the least. Mr. Obama has fewer senior advisers and top officials in his administration who have had significant private-sector experience than any previous president; hence, like all too many of the European statists and socialists, they think in static terms.

The unfortunate irony is that America’s first black president seems bent on continuing a set of policies that can lead only to continued slow growth or stagnation. The ones who are and will suffer the most from these policies are those who have the least. Mr. Obama no doubt has real compassion for the poor, but until he can begin to understand the destructive second-order effects of his policies and see that getting the foot of government off the forces of economic growth is the only real way to make life better for most of them, all too many will continue to suffer unnecessarily.