ELDER: If Trump is racist he needs to go back to racism school
Abraham Lincoln, when informed that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk, famously asked Grant’s accusers what whisky he was drinking so Lincoln could send a barrel to every general in the army. Keep this in mind when U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics accuse him of “racism” against blacks.
Under this “racist” president, black unemployment, since the government began keeping numbers, hit an all-time low in May. Polls show that inner-city parents want choice in education: specifically, they want the means to opt out of sending their children to an under-performing government school the child has been mandated to attend.
Think tanks on the left (like the Brookings Institution) and think tanks on the right (like the Heritage Foundation) pretty much agree on the formula to escape poverty: finish high school; get married before having a child; and do not have that child before you are financially capable of assuming that responsibility.
But what about the quality of that high school education? A 2004 Fordham Institute study found 44% of Philadelphia public-school teachers with school-age children of their own placed them in private schools. By 2013, the nationwide average for private-school attendance was 11% of white families and 5% of black families.
About choice in education, Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, said: “What can be done about (improving primary education) is empowering parents to make the choices for their kids. Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children.”
A 2016 poll in “Education Next” found 64% of blacks supported “a tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” Similarly, A 2015 PDK/Gallup Poll found 68% of blacks wanted the ability to “choose which public schools in the community the students attend, regardless of where they live.”
Trump also wants to stop illegal immigration. Why should that matter to urban blacks?
Harvard economist George Borjas, in his 2013 research paper “Immigration and the American Worker,” wrote: “Classifying workers by education level and age and comparing differences across groups over time shows that a 10% increase in the size of an education/age group due to the entry of immigrants (both legal and illegal) reduces the wage of native-born men in that group by 3.7% and the wage of all native-born workers by 2.5%.”
As to illegal immigration, Borjas says: “Although the net benefits to natives from illegal immigrants are small, there is a sizable redistribution effect. Illegal immigration reduces the wage of native workers by an estimated (US)$99 to $118 billion a year, and generates a gain for businesses and other users of immigrants of $107 to $128 billion.”