Study: Blacks’ Median Wealth Will be Zero in 2053

Black families have been losing savings, property, and wealth for thirty years, and will reach a median wealth of zero in 26 years, predicts a new study by left-wing groups.

“By 2024, median Black and Latino households are projected to own 60-80% less wealth than they did in 1983,” said the study, titled “The Road to Zero Wealth.” It continued:

Median Black household wealth is on a path to hit zero by 2053 … [and] median Latino household wealth is projected to hit zero twenty years later, or by 2073.

{snip}

The report was prepared by left-wing groups who blamed racial discrimination by the federal government for the shocking reversal of progress among black Americans since 1983. The groups are the Institute for Policy Studies and Prosperity Now.

{snip}

Despite the authors’ racialist worldview, the economic details in the report remain shocking and highlight the overall failure of federal policies since the 1970s to raise the income and wealth of ordinary Americans who are outside the technocratic, high-IQ, post-graduate elite.

That government failure is exemplified by the housing bubble, which destroyed a huge percentage of wealth held by black Americans.

A 2011 report by the Pew Research Center showed that the median wealth of black American households dropped by 53 percent because of the property bubble. The mid-point median of black American wealth crashed from $12,124 in 2005 to just $5,677 in 2009, according to the Pew report.

This housing disaster was caused by a bipartisan federal effort to aid minorities, not to damage minorities. In fact, former President Barack Obama worked briefly as a housing lawyer in Chicago before being elected to the federal Senate in 2006. Many of his poorly-paid black American clients lost their overpriced homes in the 2000s, but Obama continued to defend the housing-bubble policies during his tenure as president.

Latinos suffered a greater 66 percent decline in median wealth because the federal government pushed them to buy houses during the bubble. President George. W. Bush led that effort because he was trying to win votes from the growing bloc of immigrant Latinos.

Subsequently, Bush admitted that his government’s pro-Latino policy was part of the problem. Latinos’ median household wealth dropped from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 by 2009.

White Americans suffered far less from the bubble because many had already paid off their mortgages, because their debts were a small percentage of their income, and because whites had more assets in the stock market and other sectors outside the housing market. Still, the median wealth of white households also dropped by a huge 16 percent, from $134,992 in 2005 to $113,149 in 2009.

Meanwhile, wages for all men have remained flat for the past 44 years since 1973, according to the Census Bureau.

{snip}

The report does not discuss how technology is concentrating wealth among higher-skilled people, and it omits any talk of globalized outsourcing. It also avoids family stability and it ignores the topic of immigration, which has flooded the nation’s marketplace with cheap labor that effectively imposes a 5 percent tax on labor — and then transfers $500 billion a year to company owners and investors.

Instead, like an academic adding up “intersectionality” grievance points, the report blames’ African-Americans’ lower wealth on constitutional protection for slavery until the Civil War, discrimination against black farmers until about 2000, and the mortgage “redlining” which curbed bank lending to black Americans from 1935s to the 1970s.

{snip}

The report downplays personal responsibility, and because of report’s minority vs. white angle, it inadvertently suggests that black Americans and Latinos are not as responsible as white Americans when buying damaged houses when it urges the racial wealth disparity be reduced by more housing regulations:

{snip}

But many people of all colors who cannot get through college are falling behind because technology, work, and business are becoming more complex.

{snip}

The authors’ focus on racial disparities also hid the impact of cheap-labor immigration.

{snip}

In reality, four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs. However, the government imports roughly 1 million legal immigrants to compete against Americans for jobs.

The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals.

That Washington-imposed policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

Amid the huge inflow of new workers, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and the percentage of working Americans has declined steadily for the last few decades.

{snip}