Black Community Economics under Trump – Democrats Still Don’t Own your Votes

And a bit of “I told you So”.

I wrote a short piece back in 2016 about the economic consequences of leftist policy on some of the communities that ironically support these policies the most. Specifically, the average black voter has been misinformed into blindly voting for Democrats year after year, despite their worsening conditions, and always believing that the Republican candidate, without any evidence, is racist. This may be beginning to change however as more and more voters of all colors, start thinking for themselves.

Democratic US President LBJ, who was not one to mince words, is often quoted as saying, among many other racist things: “I’ll have those n*s voting Democratic for 200 years”. He may or may not have said that exactly (if you are interested in finding out, this and this are a good start), but he certainly had a lot of success with the stratagem.

In 2016, I urged black readers to realize the Democratic party does not own them, nor their votes, simply because they can scream “racism” at anyone who opposes their failed socialist policies.

Rich white people, tend to do well with either party in power, they in many cases prefer leftist administrations because of two main reasons. First, it allows them to pretend to care about the poor and minorities to one, alleviate their guilt, and two, make them feel safer. They don’t think the wolves they fear will come out and take their toys if they are on the side of the wolves.

This explains all the dastardly signs like these in upscale suburbs in Southern California and other leftist meccas:

And secondly, the type of progressive corporate cronyism the left pushes these days, along with an all powerful bureaucracy, complex financial rules, and business barriers to entry (to newcomers) suits them just fine. This is not the free market, it is the cozy relationship of certain corporate interests and governments which gives certain groups their edge, groups that are already in the inner circle. Accountants and lawyers allow them to navigate ever increasing regulations and face less competition from what would otherwise be a real free market. They can take advantage of everything from tax loopholes and green carbon credits to licenses and permits their companies already enjoy, to keep their would-be competitors out. I know these people think like this, I know many of them personally as well as through work, I know their world. The deeper the state, the better for them.

Ironically it is black people and minorities in general that suffer the most under Democratic administrations. The rich get richer no matter what, but it gets increasingly more difficult to get rich under the corporate-government alliance Democrats are enthralled to.

So, first the main economic statistics mentioned in my 2016 piece… the consequences of an Obama-Biden administration (with the data available up to that time). I did not have a crystal ball, and I did not cherry pick stats from the future, I just knew what socialism does. And I will relate how each and every one compares to our latest data (2019, yes pre-covid19 circus). But please, let’s take a closer look. Here is the 2016 quotation:

• Black home ownership has sagged from 46.1% in 2009 to 43.3% in 2014
• And it’s getting only worse, since Obama’s oath of office through the fourth quarter of 2015, the percentage of black Americans who own homes foundered further from 46.1 percent to 41.9 percent, according to the Census — down 9.1 percent.
• The black workforce is decreasing, down from 58.6% in June 2007 to 52.8% in August 2012.
• The median minority family’s income is now almost fifth lower than it was when Obama took office with a net worth of just $18,100. This is insane!
• The Black Poverty rate was at 24.7% in 2007, near the end of the Bush years (a number already very troubling and far too high) , and by 2014 Obama and Democrat policies had raised the poverty rate to 26.2%. Many of the Obama years were worse, near the end of his first term in 2011 it reached 27.6%! A Pew Report claims that the real number in 2014 was still 27.2%
• Real median income among black households during the Obama years, according to the Census Bureau, sank from $35,954 in 2009 to $35,398 to 2014 — down 1.5 percent. The 2009 number was already incredibly depressed following the largest recession since the Great Depression and the Subprime Loan Financial Meltdown (late 2007 to 2009), and still things only got worse from there!

Even Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP had to (reluctantly and restrained) had to state:

The country’s back to pretty much where it was when this president started. White people in this country are doing a bit better. Black people are doing a full point worse.

• The number of black food-stamp participants exploded across that time frame from 7,393,000 to 11,699,000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports — up 58.2 percent!!! You increase people on food stamps by nearly 60%! For the love of Gd…
• It gets worse, Blacks’ net worth fell from $16,600 to $11,000. This is an astonishing three-year drop of 34 percent. Investors Business Daily put it this way, “That’s a steeper decline than occurred from 2007 to 2010, when blacks’ net worth fell 13.5 percent.” The black/white “wealth-gap” has reached a 25-year high.

So, let me tackle each and every single one (if a bit out of order). Let’s take these two, and see what happened under Trump.

Black home ownership has sagged from 46.1% in 2009 to 43.3% in 2014

And it’s getting only worse, since Obama’s oath of office through the fourth quarter of 2015, the percentage of black Americans who own homes foundered further from 46.1 percent to 41.9 percent, according to the Census — down 9.1 percent.

Let’s give a little background here. First the statistics refers to households, not individuals, who own rather than rent, their homes. It took nearly 40 years for Black home ownership to go from 41.6% in 1970, to it’s peak in 2007 (after 8 years of G. W Bush, as well as insane lending policies) of 46.5%. As I wrote back in 2016, by 2014, well into Obama’s second term, the number was down to 43.4% and getting worse. As he kept presiding over his weak to non-existent 8-year recession “recovery”, by the end of this term, in the number had actually dropped to below 1970 levels!

By 2016, while I was writing my article, though I had no way of knowing it yet, Black home ownership in America was barely over 41%. This was not after the sub-prime mortgage crash, which Obama blamed on Bush (incorrectly but subject for another time) and promised to quickly fix. This was after 8 years of his administration and two full terms. Black home ownership rapidly accelerated its downward spiral under his watch.

What happened in 3 or less years of a Trump administration? Well, according to Zillow, Black home ownership was up to 44%! An incredible reversible of the downward trend, and an amazing upwards acceleration. It took four decades to gain about 5 points, a gain of about a point per year under a Trump administration is astounding. There is much work left to do, and a socialist administration under Biden is not going to do it, but given the chance a second Trump administration will.

Perhaps more incredibly are the owned household increases. According to the American Community Surveys, from 2015 to 2019, Owner occupied White (non Hispanic) households increased by 3%, quite impressive.

Black owned households however, increased by an incredible 8.32 percent in those few years! In 2015, there was 5.96 million Black owner-occupied households, while in 2019 there were 6.46 million!

Hispanic owner occupied households, went up a whopping 18%! It is true, that under “racist” Donald J Trump administration (who was going to take down the “bad hombres”), whites did better, everyone did better, but they (whites) did a whole lot less better than everyone else. I am not keen on comparing groups and making gaps political issues, but when you get government out of the way, and allow people of all colors and walks of life, to have the liberty to go after their goals, everyone does better and gaps tend to close rather than widen. Government entitlement programs, stifling regulations, cronyism, and corporatism (all the forte of the Democratic party), are what encourages and maintains dependency and wide gulfs in opportunity, wealth and most importantly, confidence in oneself, his community and his country.

Ok, the next one:

• The black workforce is decreasing, down from 58.6% in June 2007 to 52.8% in August 2012.

The black workforce reduction during Obama’s first term was simply shocking. Besides the general poor economic conditions, it may have been in large part due to the kind of rhetoric the administration and the Democratic party like to spew out in pandering to their voters. Plenty of viral videos from the time show black citizens having been misled into thinking that they would not have to pay their mortgage anymore, nor pay for gas nor have to work.

By the end of Obama’s second term it had improved somewhat, likely after many of those same misled people realized that they needed to work or be very very poor, even under Obama. During his administration, the employment-to-population ratio had dropped from 58.2 from when he took over in 2008, to 56.1 percent when he left office 8 years later (a level first reached in the late 1980’s). Near the end of his first term, it hit a historic low of 51%.

The improvement during Trump’s first term has been dramatic and consistent, and the Black Employment-to-Population number stood at 59.4% by Feb 2020.

As the graph above shows, these are near historical peaks, very close to an all time historical high with the exception of a relatively short-lived peak around 2000, before the dot com recession. Though the endless Democratic-led covid19-related lockdowns will have wreaked havoc with these numbers, a second Trump administration could continue to see ever growing historic highs in the black workforce.

While on the subject of employment, let us look at the reality a couple of different ways.

While the number of black Americans joining the work force have grown to record numbers, the unemployment in the black community has drastically dropped. Not an easy task to accomplish.

If we look at the Labor Force Participation Rate for Blacks, according to the St. Louis Fed, we have a significant decline during the Obama-Biden years. A sharp decline turning Obama’s first term, and further decline or stagnation during the second term. As soon as the Trump administration gets going, we see a sustained increase in Labor Force Participation Rate, undoing much of the decline during the previous 8 years.

The Obama-Biden term starts at 63.2 percent black labor force participation (already low due to the recession) and ends at 61.9 percent 8 years later, while hitting 60.3 at a record low in between.

The same statistic can be viewed from the BLS, for Trump’s term starting Jan 2017 through to the end of 2019. The trend is clear, this is a very difficult parameter to improve, by the end of 2019, the participation rate was at 62.5%, from 61.2% in Jan 2017 as Trump took office.

Or from 2016, the earliest the BLS data charts, and Obama’s last year in office:

Despite the growing workforce, (which means more people competing for jobs and more people that can be counted in the unemployment rolls), the unemployment rate and employment levels for black Americans during the Trump administration’s first term has been nothing short of astounding.

Again, from the BLS, let’s look at the Employment level for black Americans during Trump’s first (and hopefully not last) term:

And the unemployment rate (from 2016, Obama’s last year in office through to the end of 2019):

To put this in historical perspective, let’s take a look at the St. Louis Fed’s data once again:

The entire Obama-Biden double term had a dismal unemployment rate for black Americans specifically, with most of the 8 years having unemployment rates that hadn’t been seen for the black community since the late 70’s and early 80’s. The sharp unemployment increase under Obama of unemployment and extremely slow recovery did in fact require some talent, and the right mix of leftist policies. By the very end of the 8 year Obama-Biden era, unemployment had come back to, not good, but reasonable levels… levels which are increasingly difficult to improve. Easy to raise unemployment from there, but not easy to diminish it further. Yet Trump’s administration showed a truly historic accomplishment here.

Not only did unemployment continue to decrease and decrease, but it reached historic lows, which have never been seen in modern history. The black community saw unemployment levels between 5.4 and 5.6 percent by the end of 2019. Simply unheard of numbers, made even more striking, by the fact that during this period the black labor force was growing and not shrinking. Administrations often rig the unemployment numbers by counting less and less people in the labor force (you can’t be considered unemployed if you are not considered “looking” for a job.. ie retired, incarcerated, a student, a household dependent of various kinds and the like). During the Trump administration, millions of jobs were created across the country, so that the black community had record levels of people in the workforce and a record low number of unemployed.

The black community, like any other community, doesn’t need more food stamps, it needs the opportunity to better itself, to study, to work, and to enrich itself. Its members need the freedom to follow their dreams and a country where dreaming is possible.

Ok now we have the following three:

• Real median income among black households during the Obama years, according to the Census Bureau, sank from $35,954 in 2009 to $35,398 to 2014 — down 1.5 percent. The 2009 number was already incredibly depressed following the largest recession since the Great Depression and the Subprime Loan Financial Meltdown (late 2007 to 2009), and still things only got worse from there!
• The median minority family’s income is now almost fifth lower than it was when Obama took office with a net worth of just $18,100. This is insane!
• It gets worse, Blacks’ net worth fell from $16,600 to $11,000. This is an astonishing three-year drop of 34 percent. Investors Business Daily put it this way, “That’s a steeper decline than occurred from 2007 to 2010, when blacks’ net worth fell 13.5 percent.” The black/white “wealth-gap” has reached a 25-year high.

Much like the other numbers, most of the Obama-Biden years were pretty dismal. After the slow recovery near the end of the second term we were at:

• In 2016 Median income for black households was $38,555 (in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars)
  • This rose to $43,862 under Trump by 2019, a 14% real income increase (from Obama’s best year)

• In 2016 Median income for black families was $47,056 (in 2016 inflation-adjusted dollars)
  • This rose to $54,938 under Trump by 2019, a 17% real increase (again, from Obama’s best year in 2016)!

As you can see, there are some differences between households and families, and often as people do better, they can actually spilt up into more households. So an interesting statistic to look at is the aggregate black household income. How much money did all black households make, adjusted for inflation?

Well in 2016, the Obama economy’s best year after two terms of crisis or stagnation, black households earned $802,978,263,600 – that is almost 803 million dollars.

• In 2019, this figure was $946,330,319,800 or 946.33 million dollars, nearly an 18% increase!

Here is what has happened to the median household income under a Trump-Pence administration in general (for all races), and in 2019 dollars:

Historic highs of incredibly proportions, after the failed leftist policies of the 8 year Obama-Biden administration.

Now, let’s look at net worth…as my 2016 article stated, median minority households net worth were at surprising $18,100. By Obama’s last year in office, 2016, the net worth of black households was an even lower $17,150, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

According to the Fed’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, by 2019 that number had increased to $24,100, a whopping 40.5 percent!

Meanwhile, the mean net worth for black households had increased to $142,500, by 2019.

I pointed out earlier that while everyone did better under a Trump administration, blacks and Hispanics did “more better” (or caught up quicker). Here we have the same 2019 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances making the point in quite dramatic fashion (markings added of course for your convenience).

Let us take a look at the infamous food stamps.

Quoting from my 2016 piece, we had the following situation:

• The number of black food-stamp participants exploded across that time frame from 7,393,000 to 11,699,000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports — up 58.2 percent!!! You increase people on food stamps by nearly 60%! For the love of Gd…

By 2016, at the end of Obama’s second term, there were a total of 44,852,347 SNAP (Food Stamp) participants. Under the Trump administration this number had hit a low of 37,106,986 by February of 2020 (the latest number available). That is about a 21% decrease, without even accounting for population growth!

Now reducing participation in any government entitlement program, is very difficult and rarely done. Here it is a chart from that has total Food Stamp (SNAP) spending since the 1960’s.

If we first look at the general trend from point A to point C, which is the peak under the Obama-Biden second term in 2013, it is clearly upwards. We can see some leveling of growth during the Regan 80’s, an increase during the Clinton years, and then a decent reduction as the economy improved up until 2000. That small recession, and the subsequent four terms of Bush and Obama see nothing short of explosive growth in the SNAP program (roughly from points B to C).

The consistent and sharp reduction that we see in the cost of the program is truly impressive, and one can easily see how rare that is going back many decades. Government spending grows, and dependency along with it. Not under this administration, as people have began to lift themselves out of poverty.

If we look at the SNAP household participation reductions by race during the Trump administration, we can see that the drop is across the board, with once again Hispanics households seeing the largest percent drop. But for all groups, the drops are large and consistent each and every year of the Trump administration. For whites (non- Hispanic) and black households the reduction in food stamp households up until 2019 was around 14%, and for Hispanics, it was a whopping 27.22%!

Our racist president at work they keep telling us. For black households, who still have the most to catch up, and the most poverty to overcome, a change in policies back to failed socialist ones

Our racist president at work they keep telling us.

For black households, who still have the most to catch up, and the most poverty to overcome, a change in policies back to the failed socialist ones Biden and Harris will implement (or try to), would be most damaging and unfortunate. Back to the government dole, rather than continuing income and wealth generation.

And the final statistic from my 2016 article:

• The Black Poverty rate was at 24.7% in 2007, near the end of the Bush years (a number already very troubling and far too high) , and by 2014 Obama and Democrat policies had raised the poverty rate to 26.2%. Many of the Obama years were worse, near the end of his first term in 2011 it reached 27.6%! A Pew Report claims that the real number in 2014 was still 27.2%

For this, nothing much really for me to add, quoting the census will suffice for these stunning figures:

The figure shows that for Blacks, the poverty rate of 18.8% in 2019 was the lowest rate observed since poverty estimates were first produced for this group for 1959. The previous low for this group was 20.8% in 2018.

Poverty rates in 2019 were also the lowest ever observed for Hispanics (15.7%), compared to the prior low of 17.6% in 2018. Poverty statistics for Hispanics date back to 1972.  

The Asian poverty rate of 7.3% was also the lowest on record.

The 2019 poverty rate of 7.3% for non-Hispanic Whites was not statistically different than the previous low (historically adjusted) of 7.2% in 2000 and 7.3% in 1973.

Again, whites did better under Trump than under Obama, but minorities benefited far more, under this “racist” administration. To the above numbers we can cite the census figure cited.

Obama didn’t fail because he was black (or more accurately half black I suppose), any more than Trump did succeed because he was white. A white Biden will fail as miserably if not more miserably than Obama did because he shares, however insincerely, the same failed ideology, and rather than allow the Black community to enrich itself in a strong and free market, he will lead a typical Democrat administration that patronizes and demeans the black community while it encourages its dependence on government programs and panders to its leftist leaders.

These numbers are impressive, but let me be clear, Trump did not earn these dollars. He works harder than any President in recent memory but not THAT hard. He did not earn the increased wages, nor the startling increased net worth, not the record level lower unemployment nor did he buy homes for black folks at a rapid rate. Black folks did all of that and more all on their own. What Trump did do, is believe that they could do so all along.

This in sharp contrast to the Democratic party which claims that we cannot require ID’s at voting booths, to make sure we don’t have voter fraud, because black people (and other minorities) are too stupid to have an ID (I wrote a piece on that some time back)¹!

No Trump didn’t earn those dollars for the black community, nor for any community, What he did is believe in America and the American people, of whatever color they may be. He know his job is to allow the American roaring economy to thrive, not to get in its way, and to make sure our enemies around the world are treated as enemies, and our friends as friends. He knows that if the American people are given justice, law and order, security and liberty they can take care of the rest just fine.

Black people do not need government handouts, any more than any other group, they do need liberty as much as any of us, and I dare say something else…people that have recently come from regimes without liberty don’t fall for government empowerment tricks. Immigrants from Castro’s Cuba vote Republican, as do Iranians that escaped the Shah’s fall and Khomeini’s rise. Lebanese and Syrian Christian immigrants don’t need anyone to explain things to them.

When the black community had experienced total lack of liberty, they voted Republican as well… for many and many decades from Lincoln onwards. This is not a perfect analogy, there are differences between what the parties are and were, but it highlights a fundamental truth. The Republican party from its very beginning loved liberty:

“Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” was an early motto of the GOP, and the Democratic party has always wanted to organize everything from the top down (though it is true that the level of socialisms the American left wants today would have shocked either party back then!). When slavery was popular it wanted government to ensure slavery. Once it became unpopular, it would claim to want to organize things differently, but the difference in approach has been consistent, the GOP loves liberty, and I know that the black community does as well.

It is not too late. Reach out in person, reach out on social media, let your friends know and make the right choice in this momentous election. I am not inventing the wheel here, there are millions of Trump supporters from all walks of life, but these black gentlemen are so inspiring I had to include them.

Black Lives MAGA!!!

An inspiring man, the MAGA Hulk, who does not realize the irony in his claiming that he isn’t afraid (as leftist California men, women and children scurry for safety):

We patriots run WILD in liberal LA!!! It is wwaaayyyyy too late in the game to stay silent!! We need to stand OUT, stand STRONG, and stand PROUD for our president, our police, our country, and our GOD!!!!🙌🏿💯🔥🙌🏿🔥💯🙌🏿#BLEXIT #Trump2020 #Woke pic.twitter.com/rDkyZWxvZ4

— MAGA Hulk (@realmagahulk) October 20, 2020

A man whose poetic prose require no introduction:

And a young man who would put to to shame most of the advance college degreed progressives I know:

Note: I just heard from an educated acquaintance whose wife works in CNN. When asked why he thought the Hunter/Joe Biden corruption allegations are nowhere to be found on the CNN website (even if you search “Hunter Biden” on it), he responded with something to the effect that it is for the same reason that it doesn’t show Jewish blood libel sacrifices. The bubble these people have built for themselves with social media and the regular objective “mainstream” media is almost impregnable. But if you are smart enough, and want to seek out some truth, like this young man wants to, you can do it, and you don’t have to be anyone’s pawn, certainly not Biden’s, Kamala Harris’ and the Democratic party that has never done anything for you nor this great country.

Update early Nov 3 2020:

And Michigan son US Senatorial Candidate John James must be added, saying it much better than I could:

I was raised by 2 Democrats from the Jim Crow south who taught me that “if God ain’t in it, he ain’t on it.” It’s time to wake up. Neither party is perfect, but neither party will get better if they don’t have to earn our votes and reflect our values. pic.twitter.com/79YZmqGfp7

— John James (@JohnJamesMI) November 2, 2020

1. I am not black, but as a Jew born and raised in Mexico, I am not exactly a WASP either… and I can’t imagine voting for a party that labels me or my community as too stupid to have an ID to vote. We are constantly told the GOP is racist without evidence, but the condescending racism that the Democratic party endorses in so many of its positions is truly shocking. And as pandering to “victims” they are allowed any level of insulting declaration, and they take as a given and for granted, that we, any minority of any kind that they pander to for votes, have no honor. Well they are wrong I hope.