Stuff Black People Don’t Like: No Free Housing

Stuff Black People DO Like: Rioting!

Oakland is cutting police officers due to budget cuts. East Saint Louis is cutting police officers due to budget cuts. Both cities overwhelmed by violence and crime of a certain variety that have an eroding tax base no longer capable of maintaining an already porous infrastructure.

Food stamp usage sits at 40.8 million people, however funding for this program is in jeopardy of being diverted to pay for other, more pressing matters:

Some Democrats are upset and advocacy groups are outraged over the raiding of the food-stamp cupboard to fund a state-aid bailout that some call a gift to teachers and government union workers.

House members convened Tuesday and passed the multibillion-dollar bailout bill for cash-strapped states that provides $10 billion to school districts to rehire laid-off teachers or ensure that more teachers won’t be let go before the new school year begins, keeping more than 160,000 teachers on the job, the Obama administration says.

But the bill also requires that $12 billion be stripped from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, to help fund the new bill, prompting some Democrats to cringe at the notion of cutting back on one necessity to pay for another. The federal assistance program currently helps 41 million Americans.

A recent study on food stamp usage showed that 9/10 of Black children will be clients of this program by the time they are 20, which highlights the disproportionate racial allocation of this tax-payer supported entity:

In one of the most dramatic examples I’ve seen of the true reach of hunger in the United States, a new report released this week by Washington University in St. Louis researchers found that 90 percent of black children will be clients of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP/Food Stamps) at least once by the time they turn 20…

Looking at race, marital status and education simultaneously, children who are black and whose head of household is not married with less than 12 years of education have a cumulative percentage of residing in a food stamp household of 97 percent by age 10.

US Department of Labor shows Black unemployment at 15.6 percent (just imagine what this number will be once the Federal Government starts hemorrhaging jobs), with a report published by DiversityINC magazine proclaiming that ¼ of Black people are underemployed. Black teenage unemployment and recent graduate unemployment is much worse.

The percentage of unemployable Black people has never been quantified, though the discrepancies in education and income between white and Black people should offer a glimpse into what that number might be (remember the median net worth for a single Black female is $5 dollars).

A fascinating study on the disparity between Black and white people can be found here, but to put it bluntly:

The wealth gap between white and African-American families became a giant chasm over the last generation, more than quadrupling during an era of bank deregulation, according to a study released Wednesday by Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. Excluding home equity, white families now have a median net worth of $100,000, up from $22,000 in 1984. African-American families have a net worth of $5,000, up from around $2,000. One in four black families has no assets at all.

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2010-08-11