Liberal policies have not helped the impact of slavery. - Granite Grok

Liberal policies have not helped the impact of slavery.

Via Betsy’s PageProf Thomas Sowell’s take down of NYT’s opinion writer Nicholas Kristof that slavery isn’t the slavery of the past – but liberal policies aren’t helping:

…Kristof’s other “overwhelming” evidence of the current effects of past slavery is that blacks do not have as much income as whites. But Puerto Ricans do not have as much income as Japanese Americans. Mexican Americans do not have as much income as Cuban Americans. All sorts of people do not have as much income as all sorts of other people, not only in the United States, but in countries around the world. And most of these people were never enslaved.

If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Once again, it is only the “intent” that counts with Progressives – the actual results are of no matter.  Accountability is never the emphasis – only the PR that “something is being done” even as that “done” isn’t done at all.  Even the government has had to admit that Headstart has been of no use at all after billions and billions have been spent for what has turned out to be a program, not of teaching, for babysitting and Democrat voter employment.

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