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May 11, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
14:17
Income Inequality: The Debate Ignores Race
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
Complaining about income inequality is all the rage.
In his State of the Union address just a few days ago, President Obama fretted that inequality has deepened.
He also says reducing income inequality and promoting upward mobility is the defining challenge of our time.
is right up there with racism as enemy number one.
But this talk about fighting income inequality is mostly nonsense.
First, inequality is natural, inevitable.
People are unequal in every possible way.
Not even the most ruthlessly egalitarian regimes run by Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot could enforce across-the-board equality.
And how much equality do we want anyway?
Presumably we don't want everyone in America to get the same grade on the SAT.
We want them to get the highest grades they can.
The second obvious blind spot about income inequality is that practically no one points out that for the last 20 or 30 years we have been importing millions of poor people.
They then go on to have millions of poor children.
This, along with a large native population of blacks, guarantees increasing income inequality.
It's scandalous that no one mentions something so obvious.
But is President Obama right?
Are the rich getting richer?
They're getting a lot richer.
From 1950 to 1980, the top 1% of American households made about 10% of the national income.
Now they make close to 23%.
1% of American households get almost a quarter of the national income.
This graph shows increases in income since 1980.
The top 1%, the red line, they're up by 201%.
Not bad.
You'll notice, though, that no group is actually down.
The people in the next 19%, the orange line, they're up 65%.
The bottom 20%, represented by the dark blue line, they're up 49%.
The middle 60%, the light blue line, they've gained the least, just 40%.
And there has been a dip in the last few years.
So there is some truth to the view that the incomes of middle-class households are stagnating.
But the poor are not getting poorer.
Remember, however, that these numbers are for households.
The rise in income inequality for individuals is considerably less.
How can that be?
It's because so many more people are living in separate households, and a lot of those new households are single mothers with very low incomes.
In 1960, the average American household had 3.35 people in it.
10% of those households were headed by a single parent.
By 2009, the average household had lost almost a whole person and was down to 2.63 people.
And the percentage of single-parent households had tripled to 30%.
A huge increase in poor single mothers certainly added a lot to income inequality by household.
You hear a lot about corporate greed and the wildly inflated salaries of CEOs, and there's a lot to that.
According to data from Bloomberg News, in 1950, a Fortune 500 CEO made 20 times as much money as his average employee.
In 2012, he was making 200 times as much as his average employee.
Professional athletes have cleaned up, too.
In the 1950s, the typical Major League Baseball player sold shoes for Sears and Roebuck during the offseason.
In 2012, the average salary in pro baseball was $3.2 million and the lowest salary was half a million.
People may be envious of sports stars and CEOs with gigantic salaries, but those salaries don't make us poor.
Bill Gates didn't get rich by making you poor.
He got rich by making software you wanted to buy.
Robinson Cano just signed a $240 million contract with the Seattle Mariners because a lot of people want to watch him play baseball.
Should there be a law to cut his pay?
The fact that the rich are becoming super-rich does not mean that there's been a slowdown in upward mobility.
A recent Harvard study found that the likelihood of someone born in the bottom fifth of income brackets rising to the top fifth has not changed in 30 years.
Something that seriously skews incomes in America is the poverty of blacks and Hispanics.
This graph shows the average total cash income per household member by race in 2012.
That is to say, household income divided by the number of people in each household.
As you can see, the United States has, in effect, two populations, whites and Asians, who per capita make more than $30,000 a year.
And blacks and Hispanics who make less than $20,000 a year.
The mere presence of blacks and Hispanics, therefore, increases America's income inequality.
And this partly explains why the states with the greatest income inequality in 2009 were California and Texas, with their very mixed populations.
And the ones with the least income inequality were overwhelmingly white states.
Such as Maine, Vermont, Montana, and Wyoming.
The next time someone complains about income inequality, point that out.
This table shows the poverty rates for different populations.
As you can see, blacks are nearly three times more likely than whites to be poor, and Hispanics are more than two and a half times more likely.
Blacks and Hispanics together account for almost exactly 30% of the population, but 53% of the total of 43 million or so people who are poor.
But note something else.
The group with the highest poverty rate of all is Hispanic immigrants and their children.
They are the clearest possible example of the fact that while we claim to be fighting poverty, we import poor people.
The presence of Blacks and Hispanics greatly increases the welfare burden as well.
This table shows the rates at which different people use means-tested programs.
That includes food stamps, housing subsidies, welfare, Medicaid, Head Start, and free meals at school.
There are more than 70 federal handout programs that cost more than $700 billion every year.
Of the native-born groups, blacks, at 43.8% are most likely to have a foot in the public trough.
But Hispanic immigrants are even more not likely.
Not surprising, perhaps, since 47% of them are high school dropouts.
Again, this is how we import poverty.
Poor foreigners walk across our borders and are so poor they qualify for handouts.
Obamacare, of course, is yet another huge transfer of wealth because it will subsidize medical insurance for poor people.
It's like an enormous expansion of Medicaid.
Estimates are that 55% of the subsidies will go to non-whites.
In 2011, the country reached an astonishing milestone.
There are now more people in this country getting means-tested benefits than there are people with year-round full-time jobs.
Just think about that for a moment.
And by the way, no one ever points this out either, but all of these racial percentages for poverty and welfare, they are undercounts.
Why? Because they leave out prisoners, of which there were about 2 million in 2009.
Except for a few securities fraudsters, prisoners are poor.
They are very poor.
They count on you, the taxpayer, for everything.
An average room and board for a prisoner is $31,000 a year, with a low of $14,600 in Kentucky and a high of $60,000 in New York.
It costs more to keep somebody locked up in New York than it would to send him to Harvard.
The Department of Justice tells us that in 2009, blacks were 6.7 times more likely than whites to be locked up, and Hispanics were 2.5 times more likely.
The disproportions are therefore even greater than for welfare.
Blacks and Hispanics, who are 30% of the population, account for 60% of the prison population.
About $50 billion a year.
And blacks and Hispanics account for $30 billion.
So you see, we don't just import poverty.
We claim to be fighting crime, but we import people with high crime rates.
We claim to be fighting school failure, but we import people whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren drop out of school.
We claim to be fighting disease.
But we import people with leprosy, tuberculosis, and diseases I can't even pronounce.
We claim to be fighting for families, but we import people with high rates of illegitimacy and divorce.
Crazy? You bet it is.
And who picks up the tab?
The federal government collects about $1.3 trillion a year in personal income tax.
That's money out of your pocket and mine.
And the more money you make, the higher your tax rate.
As a result, the top 1% of taxpayers, they pay more in taxes than the bottom 60% of taxpayers.
That's right, 1% pay more than 60%.
Now, the statistic I would love to have, but don't, is the percentage of income taxes paid by each racial group.
That top 1%.
As well as the top 40% that pay about 85% of all income taxes, it's bound to be overwhelmingly white.
How much does each race put into the system, and how much does each race take out?
Are blacks and Hispanics a net loss?
They could be, couldn't they?
But if anyone has ever done those calculations, he's not letting on.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform did a study of illegal aliens in Texas, however.
It found that every year illegals consume $10.8 billion more in state services than they pay in taxes.
Most of that was for education, free medical care, and law enforcement.
This cost each native household more than $1,000 a year in taxes.
And if those illegals get amnesty, they will qualify for even more handout programs that cost even more money.
So, do you remember that graph that showed middle class incomes not rising by all that much?
Partly, it's because the middle class has to pay so much in taxes because of blacks, Hispanics, and illegal immigrants to feed them, house them, medicate them, keep them in jail.
And try to educate them.
If the United States were a homogeneous white country, we would have a lot less income inequality because there would be a lot fewer poor people.
Taxes would be lower because we would have a lot fewer people on welfare and a lot fewer prisoners.
This is obvious.
But Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and even the Republicans don't dare point these things out.
One final thought.
I'm sure you have heard that immigration is good for America because immigrants will pay for our retirement just as we have paid for their schooling and welfare.
Don't count on it.
When have you ever heard a Mexican immigrant say thank you?
No, the longer they are here, the more resentful they get.
By the time non-whites are a majority and in a position to make the laws, Paying for Social Security and Medicare for old white people will be the last of their priorities.
Diversity is not a strength.
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