Obama has not made things better- At all for Blacks

Obama has not made things better for Blacks At all.

By Herman Cain

I know I’m about to tackle an issue that many black people are going to be upset to hear me talking about. But the reason I need to is that you’re not going to hear anywhere else about the state of black unemployment and black poverty in American since president Obama took office.

Now the president does acknowledge there is a problem when it comes to how young men of color are doing, although he blames in on the fact that many of them don’t have fathers and so forth. That is clearly a factor, but when you look at economic statistics now compared to before Obama took office, you need to recognize that one primary thing has changed, and that is that we now have Obama’s economic policies in place.

And that is a huge contributing factor to the biggest problem of all for black Americans: Too many of them don’t have a job. When you have a stalled economy – as we have ever since Obama took office, and still have today with the most recent quarter showing a full 1.0 percent retraction of GDP – the people hurt the most are those already at the lowest portion of the income scale.

That is the very black Americans who have grown up struggling with poverty, and who in many cases lacked fathers. The very people it was thought would be helped by having Barack Obama in the White House. They have not been helped. They are struggling more than they did throughout most of the previous decade.

You’re not going to hear this from liberal black activists or from the media, but you’ll hear it here. Let’s look at the numbers:
When President Obama took office, the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 7.8 percent. By May 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure had fallen to a somewhat improved 6.3 percent (although that is fudged for political purposes, but never mind that right now). Among blacks, it had fallen from 12.7 percent to 11.5 percent, which again is somewhat better but is still horrendous. But for blacks aged 16-19, unemployment remains above 30 percent.

It gets worse. Overall poverty under Obama has increased from 14.3 percent to 15 percent. For black Americans, the poverty rate went from 26 percent to a little over 27 percent. Meanwhile, median household income for black people dropped from $34,900 to $33,300.
Democrats consider it a policy success when more people are dependent on government, so they might like this next figure, although I don’t think anyone else will: The number of black people on food stamps under Obama has grown from 7.4 million to nearly 11 million as of 2012.

Now you can argue that it’s not Obama’s fault when people don’t have jobs or end up on food stamps because people need to take responsibility for their own lives, and I agree it is much better if people view it that way. But here’s the problem: Obama ran for president, and ran for re-election, by telling people that they would have a better chance of getting out of poverty and unemployment if he was in office implementing his left-wing big-government policies.

How’s that working out for you?
Obama’s policies don’t lift the poor at the expense of the rich, as he would have you believe. What his policies do is kill economic growth and wealth creation, and that eliminates the opportunities that might have existed for people to access opportunity and improve their own situations.

Obama the candidate told you that if you’re struggling, it’s because someone else is doing too well, and it’s not fair, and he was going to make things equal. He encouraged you to put your faith in him to make things better for you.

None of what he said was true – neither about the nature of the problem nor about his plans to solve it – and if you’ve been waiting for Obama to make things better for you, you’ve just wasted more than five years of your life.

We publish a lot of information here about how you can improve your situation, and I encourage you to check back often and read it. But I’ll give you one tip right now that you should put into action immediately: Don’t expect anything in your life to improve because of Barack Obama. It hasn’t and it won’t.