Can race discrimination explain today’s problems?

Can race discrimination explain today’s problems?

By Walter E. Williams

Though racial discrimination exists, it is nowhere near the barrier it once was. The relevant question is: How much of what we see today can be explained by racial discrimination? This is an important question because, if we conclude that racial discrimination is the major cause of black problems when it isn’t, then effective solutions will be elusive forever. To begin to get a handle on the answer, let’s pull up a few historical facts about black Americans.
In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that, in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925,” reports, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families (composed of two parents and children). What is significant, given today’s arguments that slavery and discrimination decimated the black family structure, is the fact that years ago, there were only slight differences in family structure among racial groups.

Coupled with the dramatic breakdown in the black family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.
The point of bringing up these historical facts is to ask this question, with a bit of sarcasm: Is the reason the black family was far healthier in the late 1800s and 1900s that back then there was far less racial discrimination and there were greater opportunities? Or did what experts call the “legacy of slavery” wait several generations to victimize today’s blacks?
The Census Bureau pegs the poverty rate among blacks at 28.1 percent. A statistic that one never hears about is that the poverty rate among intact married black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades, currently at 8.4 percent. Weak family structures not only spell poverty and dependency but also contribute to the social pathology seen in many black communities – for example, violence and predatory sex. Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation’s homicide victims, blacks are also major victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault, rape and robbery.
To put this violence in perspective, black fatalities during the Korean War (3,075), Vietnam War (7,243) and all wars since 1980 (about 8,200) come to about 18,500, a number that pales in comparison with black loss of life at home. Young black males had a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities.
The black academic achievement gap is a disaster.
Often, black 12th-graders can read, write and deal with scientific and math problems at only the level of white sixth-graders. This doesn’t bode well for success in college or passing civil service exams.
If it is assumed that problems that have a devastating impact on black well-being are a result of racial discrimination and a “legacy of slavery” when they are not, resources spent pursuing a civil rights strategy will yield disappointing results.

A real president could solve the tax loophole problem

A real president could solve the tax loophole problem

By Charles Krauthammer
The Obama administration is highly exercised about “inversion,” the practice by which an American corporation acquires a foreign company and moves its headquarters out of the U.S. to benefit from lower tax rates abroad.
Not fair, says Barack Obama. It’s taking advantage of an “unpatriotic tax loophole” that hardworking American families have to make up for by the sweat of their brow. His treasury secretary calls such behavior a violation of “economic patriotism.”
Nice touch. Democrats used to wax indignant about having one’s patriotism questioned. Now they throw around the charge with abandon, tossing it at corporations that refuse to do the economically patriotic thing of paying the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.
Odder still because Democrats routinely ridicule the very notion of corporations as persons. When Mitt Romney suggested this in 2011, Democrats mocked him right through Election Day. In the Hobby Lobby case, they challenged the very idea that corporations can have religious convictions. Now, however, Democrats are demanding that corporations exercise a patriotic conscience.
Moreover, corporations have an indisputable fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ interest. Surely Walgreens betrayed this responsibility when it caved to administration pressure and canceled its plans to move its headquarters to Switzerland. The inversion would’ve saved it billions of dollars. Its cancellation caused an instant 14 percent drop in Walgreens shares. But the Democrats’ problem is deeper. Everyone knows why inversions are happening. America’s 35 percent corporate tax rate is absurdly uncompetitive. Companies are doing what they always do: legally lower their tax liabilities.
What is maddening is that the problem is so easily solved: tax reform that lowers the accursed corporate rate. Democrats and Republicans agree on this. After the announcement of the latest inversion, Burger King buying Tim Hortons and then moving to Canada, the president himself issued a statement conceding that corporate tax reform – lower the rates, eliminate loopholes – is the best solution to the inversion problem. It’s also politically doable. Tax reform has unique bipartisan appeal. Conservatives like it because lowering rates stimulates the economy and eliminating loopholes curbs tax-driven economic decisions that grossly misallocate capital.
The appeal to liberals is economic fairness. By eliminating loopholes, tax reform levels the playing field. Today, the more powerful companies can afford the expensive lobbyists who create the loopholes and the expensive lawyers who exploit them. Which is why the nominal corporate tax rate is 35 percent but the effective rate for some of the largest corporations is about 13 percent.
So why not attack the inversion problem with its obvious solution: tax reform? Time is short, says Obama. He can’t wait. Instead, he wants legislation to outlaw inversion.
No time? Where has he been? He does nothing about tax reform for six years (during two of which Democrats fully controlled Congress), then claims now to be too impatient to attempt the real solution. Instead he wants to hurry through a punitive anti-inversion law to counterbalance the effects of our already punitive tax rates.
This is nuts. But amusing, given that a major financier of the inversion-celebre of the day, the Whopper-to-Canada deal, is none other than Warren Buffett, Obama’s favorite plutocrat.
Buffett’s demand that the rich be required to pay more taxes made him a hero to the president. In 2012, Obama repeatedly held up Buffett as a champion of economic justice. What does Obama say today about his 2012 class-war comrade in arms – now become, by Obama’s own lights, an economic traitor?
And more such Benedict Arnolds are being minted every week. One of the reasons for the recent acceleration of inversions is that corporations want to move before Obama outlaws it, locking them into America’s anti-competitive corporate tax rate.
The Wall Street Journal cited a Buffett confidant as saying he likely wouldn’t have backed a deal like Burger King if it were purely for tax reasons. Indeed, there are other considerations that can always be invoked. Which makes some of the contemplated anti-inversion proposals even more absurd: They would outlaw only those mergers done for tax reasons. How do you prove motivation?
A real political leader would abandon this sideshow and actually address corporate tax reform with a serious revenue neutral proposal to Congress. There would be hearings, debate, compromises. We might end up with something like the historic bipartisan tax reform of 1986 that helped launch two decades of nearly uninterrupted economic growth. But for that you need a president.

[note: tax reform will not address the real issues, only throwing out the current tax code and implementing a "simple tax" will truly address the myriad of issues and drive the lobbyist and lawyers out of business]

Why penalize those who follow the rules?

Why penalize those who follow the rules?

I need some advice from Enquirer readers. What do I tell my relatives in Hungary who, for years, have been trying to emigrate to the United States to escape terrible living conditions and provide a better life for their families, only to be told, “Sorry, the quota for Eastern Europeans is filled. Get in line and wait”?
They followed all the rules and obeyed all the laws but are told “you can’t come,” yet they see thousands of people who illegally entered our country through a porous southern border now being considered for “a pathway to citizenship.”
They ask me, “Where did we go wrong? How can we enter the United States?” The only thing I can think to tell them is to go to Mexico, tell everyone you’re Latinos and sneak across the border. Any other suggestions?

Lewis J. Chizer, College Hill

Letters to the Editor, Cincinnati Enquirer

Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was a failure.

Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was a failure.

Her policies emboldened our enemies and destabilized the Middle East.

And no crisis is more symbolic of her ineffective and flailing foreign policy than the rise of ISIS.

She championed arming the Syrian rebels, some of whom were allied with ISIS.

And she fully supported intervening in the Syrian civil war which could have led to ISIS snatching control of that country.

Fortunately the American people rose up and halted the march to war, but our nation must now contend with the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq.

Intervening without a care for the consequences was a staple of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy, and it only served to strengthen Islamic radicals and damage our interests.

You see, Syria wasn't the only country where Hillary Clinton demonstrated a lack of foresight in foreign policy.

It was "Hillary's War" in Libya that generated the chaotic situation which led to the murder of our ambassador in Benghazi.

With voices in both parties clamoring for more intervention in the Middle East, it's vital we learn lessons from past foreign policy decisions so America can confront the danger ISIS poses while acting in the best interest of America and our allies like Israel.

There is a disease debilitating this country referred to as LIBERALISM

There is a disease debilitating this country referred to as LIBERALISM

There is a disease debilitating this country referred to as LIBERALISM, and it shares the same basic delusional tenets of Progressivism, Socialism, Marxism and Communism. The most common and obvious symptoms of this disease is the overwhelming need of the infected individual to constantly exhibit an unbridled penchant to champion one ludicrous cause after the next with complete indifference and disregard to the consequences of those causes!

It is relatively simple to diagnose.

When an individual begins to babble on incoherently, spewing delusional drivel regarding the need for egalitarianism, or the need to deprive everyone of Rights to which they object, or the need to make someone else’s life as miserable as their own, or the need to redistribute the income of American’s who actually work for a living, or the wonders of the Tyranny of Collectivism and a Marxist Socialist Dystopia, or they begin to banter about virulent terms like racist, bigot, homophobe, misogynist, sexist, xenophobe, natavist and white privilege or “George Bush” you can be assured that individual has contracted LIBERALISM!

Other symptoms or side effects that have been detected with those who have had prolonged exposure to the disease of Liberalism is that they develop an uncanny need to lie, to distort the facts, to distort the truth, to rely upon abstract logic and to orchestrate and foment political hysteria and chaos at every opportunity for which they can take advantage!

Fortunately, this disease is not contagious to AMERICAN’S and only affects useless, mindless, weak willed, spineless, mediocre, freeloading reprobates, ingrates and degenerates like Michael Moore looking for someone else to blame for the complete failure of their delusional sociopolitical ideologies and their miserable lives!

Collective Stupidity and Lunacy are the inevitable consequence of Liberalism; unfortunately, the only remedy for this malady requires the infected individual to acquire logic, reason and common sense which precludes any possible cure for those who have already contracted the disease of Liberalism!

The differences between those of us AMERICAN’S who believe in Individual Responsibility, Freedom, Liberty and the Unalienable Rights of each and every Sovereign American and those Liberal Lunatics, Delusional Democrats and Progressive Communists that believe in the Tyranny of the Collective are irreconcilable.

Sooner or later those irreconcilable ideologies will culminate in a Civil Conflict like we have seen around the country including Ferguson. Missouri.