Political Reform

Black Poverty Page 2




The current Welfare system puts monetary penalties on poor blacks if they stay together as a family, or if they try to get a job.  These penalties make it harder for black families to get out of poverty.  The penalties come in the form of benefit cutoff levels.  If a black woman's husband stays in the house, she might lose all of her welfare benefits.  If a poor black person gets a job, even if it isn't a very good job they risk losing ALL of their welfare benefits.  Many poor people are force to give up jobs to keep their welfare payments because the job didn't pay as much as the welfare.

A system where benefits aren't all or nothing, but instead where the benefits scale back as you earn more would help reform this.  You would also need to stop penalizing families for having a father in the home.

Affirmative Action, in the form of Racial Quotas helped to combat racism in university admissions decades ago.  We don't really have a problem with racism in the admissions office any more though, and so these policies are not very effective.  In addition it has been proven that these policies are hurting black and hispanic graduation rates.  When California finally ended racial quotas they saw black graduation rates climb by over 50%.  We need to modernize our method of affirmative action in order to go after the problems that exist today, instead of the problems that existed 40 years ago.  My suggestion for Affirmative Action going forward is to do it in the form of school vouchers and vouchers for job training programs.

Current Housing programs operate mostly by forcing banks to loan money to poor individuals.  This actually causes housing prices to go up instead of down, making it even harder for poor people to afford the house.  Rather than treating the symptom, which is that banks don't want to lend to poorer customers, we should be treating the root cause.  the root cause is that housing is too expensive for poorer families to afford.  This high price is largely caused by city, state and federal limitation on how much housing can be built.  If you look at a place like Texas you can easily find a simple home for  $50,000.  But if you go to some place like Chicago, New York, or San Francisco such affordable housing is impossible to find.  The actual cost to build a house has not changed between the states, the difference is in regulations and zoning which restrict the availability of homes.  When houses are artificially scarce due to government interference, supply and demand kick in and cause the price of a home to skyrocket.  This hurts poor families much more than it hurts the rich.  Getting housing prices to go down in poor areas largely populated by blacks would really help them to get ahead.

Follow these links to see more on Welfare ReformEducation ReformCheap Housing, and the Minimum Wage

The current democrat party is opposing anything that would help black communities.  This is not new.
The democrat party has always been on the wrong side of civil rights.
The Democrat party founded the KKK to force people to vote democrat.  Blacks were 100% republican at the time, so suppressing Republican votes was the same as suppressing black votes.  
So why do Blacks vote Democrat?


The answer is that Democrats PROMISE to fix black poverty, of course they never DO it.  They just promise to.