I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.

There's a lot more to it than just "take away entitlements" ...

 

Then drop the "shiftless ..." shtick. It's intellectually dishonest.

 

It's not intellectually dishonest at all. I don't think that people understand that that's what they're actually saying when they repeat the following schtick from Fox News and/or the Republican Party: "The solution to black poverty in America is personal responsibility."

I see it here all the time. Old_Tony says stuff like that all the time. Poindexter said we were "excuse-making" and "rationalizing" by calling it a policy failure.

Well, OK. The alternative is that blacks aren't as good as whites.

 

A large element of racists within one of the two sides* operates along a "shiftless!/lesser DNA" paradigm and the more intellectually enlightened element within that side not only fails to denounce or eradicate it but in fact encourages it.

 

That isn't the alternative at all. Are you saying personal responsibility is not part of the equation? Perhaps a major part?

There is a middle ground between "it's all government's fault" and "black people aren't as good as whites."

There are more opportunities out there for minorities to succeed than ever before, more than could have been dreamed of 100 years ago, or 50 or even 30. And there are more minorities taking advantage of them than ever, too. So why aren't even more people taking advantage of those opportunities? I don't know. Perhaps some programs are incentivizing them not to even look for such opportunities. Perhaps there are industries trying to hold them down. Perhaps there's an entire industry aimed at telling them the deck is stacked against them from the beginning and they have no chance.

I don't know what the answer is. I do know that telling people that a major part of the responsibility for getting themselves out of poverty is theirs is not the same as calling them "shiftless."

 

These sound like policy failures.

 

Do they? One of them does. And I'm not saying any of those are the problem -- certainly not the entire problem -- hence the "perhaps."

But you didn't answer the actual question: Are you saying personal responsibility is not part of the equation? Perhaps a major part?

And I'll add one: Do you really think telling people that a major part of the responsibility for getting themselves out of poverty is theirs is the same as calling them "shiftless" and saying their race is not as good as another?

 

What is this "industry" you speak of?

And, whatever it is, isn't its existence a policy failure? In other words, the rules and regulations of our economy are set up so as to permit a free market that spawns such an industry. The government works the knobs and levers of the economy all the time to favor some industries and disfavor others. That it hasn't disfavored this particular industry - whatever it is - is a policy failure.

No. That's not what I'm saying. Of course people should take "personal responsibility" for getting themselves out of poverty. To the extent they can, and given circumstances that make that a possibility, on a large scale. But saying it over and over on Fox News or from the stump doesn't seem to be an approach that takes.

What I'm saying is that the following statement, or variations on it, dismisses black poverty as a result of shiftless/lesser DNA:

"Asians and Indians and Jews have risen from poverty. Why haven't blacks? The solution is personal responsibility."

 

Anybody think poor black people may be disproportionately affected by the rise of income inequality since the Reagan administration? The bottom 90 percent has experienced less than 10 percent of all salary growth since 1979.

 

Ah ... so Wall Street hedge fund managers saw their salaries rise hundredfold/thousandfold/whateverthefuckfold, and poor black people in Mississippi saw their's go up only twofold/fivefold/tenfold, and that's why poor black people in Mississippi remain mired in their poverty.

The policy failure was allowing those hedge fund managers' salaries to go up as much as they did. Because if the salary gains of those hedge fund managers had been equivalent to those of those of poor black Mississippians, those Mississippians wouldn't be poor anymore.

 

More than a quarter of men between the ages of 25 and 34 earned poverty-level wages in 2013, up from a little over 10 percent in 1979.

Our policy failure has been allowing this to happen. And, yes, it is in our control and not the markets doing what they do.

 

According to this chart (first one I could find on Google but similar to most other stuff out there), real income growth for the bottom half of the country has been bupkus in that time frame.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Income-Distribution.php