Obama’s Tragic Legacy for Black Americans

Jason L. Riley writing at the Wall Street Journal online:

At the urging of labor unions, President Obama has pushed for higher minimum wages that price a disproportionate percentage of blacks out of the labor force.

At the urging of teachers unions, he has fought voucher programs that give ghetto children access to better schools.

Both policies have a lengthy track record of keeping millions of blacks ill-educated and unemployed.

Since the 1970s, when the federal government began tracking the racial achievement gap, black test scores in math, reading and science have on average trailed far behind those of their white classmates.

And minimum-wage mandates have been so effective for so long at keeping blacks out of work that 1930, the last year in which there was no federal minimum-wage law, was also the last year that the black unemployment rate was lower than the white rate.

For the past half-century, black joblessness on average has been double that of whites...
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Link: http://www.wsj.com/article_email/obamas-tragic-legacy-for-black-americans-1444776773-lMyQjAxMTE1MzExNDIxOTQ4Wj