the poor are getting poorer?

[el_profe]

Its a myth that the poor are getting poorer. Here is an article with some facts.
Also a good parto of the poor population would not be poor in any other country in the world.

Here is an article from: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3454


A Nation of "Hamburger Flippers"?
by Walter Williams (January 14, 2004)

Summary: How many times have we heard that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? Contrary to that nonsense, the fact of the matter is that some of the rich are getting poorer, and many of the poorer are getting richer.

[www.CapitalismMagazine.com]

It might have been Ross Perot who first used the expression that America is turning into a nation of "hamburger flippers," in reference to the decline in good paying manufacturing jobs replaced by low-pay service sector jobs.

Here's my question: If millions of high-paying jobs are leaving the country only to be replaced by millions of low-paying jobs, what prediction would you make about the trend in our standard of living? It would have to be in steep decline, but the facts don't square with that. Per capita GDP, the population divided into the value of goods and services produced, is one of the methods used to gauge the standard of living. The historical trend, including today, is a rising American standard of living. In fact, our per capita GDP in 1980 was $21,500 and, as of 2002, it was $36,000 -- a 59 percent increase. So how can it be that we're becoming a nation of low-pay hamburger flippers?

How about this pronouncement: The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? The Census Bureau just came out with a report saying that 35 million Americans are living in poverty. Robert Rector and Kirk A. Johnson addressed this figure in their recent publication "Understanding Poverty in America," produced by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

From various government reports they find that: 46 percent of poor households actually own their homes; 76 percent have air conditioning; the typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities in Europe; nearly 75 percent of poor households own one car, and 30 percent own two or more cars; 97 percent have at least one color television; 62 percent have cable or satellite reception; and 25 percent have cell phones.

While "poor" Americans don't live in opulence, they are surely not poor either by international or historical standards in our own country. I'm betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he'd choose United States.

How many times have we heard that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer? Contrary to that nonsense, the fact of the matter is that some of the rich are getting poorer, and many of the poorer are getting richer.

According to the 1995 Annual Report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, only 5 percent of those in the bottom 20 percent category of income earners in 1975 were still there in 1991. What happened to them? A majority made it to the top 60 percent of the income distribution -- middle class or better -- over that 16-year span. Almost 29 percent of them rose to the top 20 percent.

The evidence suggests that low income is largely a transitory experience for those willing to work. There's no mystery to it: As a function of age, people get wiser and gain more experience. That means it's not very intelligent to think one can make meaningful statements about poverty simply by measuring income at a particular point in time. By the way, people are also mobile downward, as suggested by the joke that the easiest way to become a Texas millionaire is to start out as a Texas billionaire.

Here's Williams' roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.



About the Author: Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
the 35 million poor people is just 12.5% of the population, i considered the pop. to be 280. And many of them would be middle class in many other countries. Most of you talk of the poor(in america) like they where starving to death

[Y2A]

All they are going to say is that this is capitalist "propaganda" and rule it out. You shouldn't have even bothered.

[Sabocat]

And why wouldn't we? Whenever we use a source that isn't CNN, FoxNews or the typical network propaganda, you discredit it.

[el_profe]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14 2004, 10:39 PM
All they are going to say is that this is capitalist "propaganda" and rule it out. You shouldn't have even bothered.
the stats are there, stats dont lie.
And this is not from fox, cnn or any other news source.

[BuyOurEverything]

From various government reports they find that: 46 percent of poor households actually own their homes; 76 percent have air conditioning; the typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities in Europe; nearly 75 percent of poor households own one car, and 30 percent own two or more cars; 97 percent have at least one color television; 62 percent have cable or satellite reception; and 25 percent have cell phones.

What's his definition of poor?

[Sabocat]

The growing gap between rich and poor



THE U.S. economy experienced record growth during the 1990s. Corporate America raked in profits at home and abroad, and books appeared with titles like The Dow at 40,000--reflecting Wall Street’s belief that an era of unlimited prosperity had arrived. The decade ended with amazed politicians scratching their heads over what to do with a trillion-dollar federal budget surplus.

But working Americans didn’t benefit from the corporate feast. And the Bush administration has already spent the surplus--and then some--on war and tax cuts for the rich. Today, the gap between the haves and the have-nots in U.S. society is as great as ever--clear evidence that all Americans are not "on the same side." TOM LEWIS examines the reality of workers’ lives after the bosses’ biggest bonanza in history.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

AS RECESSION took hold of the U.S. economy in late 1999, one financial bubble after another began to burst. But one bubble that didn’t pop was the salary bubble for America’s leading corporate executives.

In 2002, the median salary for CEOs at the top 100 U.S. corporations was $33.4 million. At the average large company in the U.S., the top dog pocketed $5.2 million. That means median CEO pay at large companies was a whopping $1,017 an hour.

Even Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. invasion of Iraq, earned a pittance by comparison--just $69.10 an hour for the services that he rendered to U.S. oil interests. While CEOs wallowed in millions, doctors made an average of $60.14 an hour, grade-school teachers earned $28.01 an hour and firefighters received $17.16 an hour. The average worker in the U.S. got $16.23 an hour. And workers in downsized or unskilled jobs made only half of that figure.

This vast inequality today is part of a trend that grew throughout the 1990s. In the era of corporate globalization, billions of workers and poor people around the world learned that a country’s economic growth does not automatically result in rising standards of living for the majority.

And the U.S. is no exception. The 13,000 richest families in the U.S. now have almost as much income as the 20 million poorest. "And those 13,000 families have incomes 300 times that of average families," liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine.

In the mid-1990s, the United Nations published a report showing that the U.S. had already become the most class-stratified society among all the advanced industrial countries. Now, wealth in the U.S. is even more concentrated in the hands of a few. "It’s remarkable how little growth has trickled down to ordinary families," Krugman explained. "Median family income has risen only about 0.5 percent per year--and as far as we can tell...just about all of that increase was due to wives working longer hours, with little or no gain in real wages."

In their 1992 campaign for the White House, Bill Clinton and Al Gore liked to point out that the top 1 percent of Americans owned 40 percent of the country’s wealth. They also said that if you eliminated home ownership and only counted businesses, factories and offices, then the top 1 percent owned 90 per cent of all wealth. And the top 10 percent, they said, owned 99 percent!

But once in office, Clinton and Gore did nothing to redistribute wealth more equally--despite the fact that their two terms in office spanned the economic joyride of the 1990s. On the contrary, inequality only continued to grow.

But it isn’t just that gains have been nonexistent for most U.S. workers in recent years. Life has gotten worse, and dreams of the future have darkened. Some 2.6 million jobs have disappeared since March 2001--the longest sustained period of job losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Two million workers lost their health insurance last year alone because of layoffs. And workers who still had coverage faced skyrocketing costs and larger co-payments.

In 1988, 27 percent of American workers belonged to health maintenance organizations (HMOs). During the 1990s, the CEOs and Washington’s politicians drove the vast majority of Americans with health coverage into the HMOs. They said that the HMO "managed care" system would control costs and save money for ordinary people. But by 2001, 93 percent of U.S. workers and retirees got their health services through managed care--and were paying more for it!

Most states now face dramatic budget shortfalls. This means fewer social services--from welfare to veterans’ benefits to support for disabled kids--and more hardship for workers and their families. The recession is partly to blame, but giveaways to corporations and tax cuts for the wealthy threaten to make the added burdens permanent.

Public education, for example, lies squarely on the chopping block. Politicians have slashed education budgets for kindergarten through high school, and annual double-digit tuition hikes have become the norm in colleges and universities. State and local governments, under pressure from Washington, are forcing parents and students to pay directly for an ever-increasing portion of their college degree. In many states, the increased amount that families must bear exactly matches the amount by which state funding has been reduced.

The bosses’ bonanza did nothing to improve the quality of life for U.S. workers. Hunger is still a daily reality for one in five children in the U.S. under the age of 18. One in four under the age of six goes to bed undernourished. And 25 percent of kids under the age of six officially live in poverty.

Their parents fare little better. Even though unemployment has surpassed 6 percent, the average American now works nine weeks longer per year than European workers do. We work the equivalent of five weeks longer than we did here in 1973--about 200 hours more each year. All of this has contributed to vast amounts of stress, heart disease, depression and other ailments--as U.S. workers literally work themselves to death.

Debt is a major source of worry and anxiety. No matter how hard or how long we work, it seems increasingly impossible to make ends meet each month. In the first three months of 2001, workers not only were unable to save, but used credit cards to spend 7 percent more than they earned. Personal debt is now at a record 120 percent of personal income in America.

But if we work hard, we’re told, at least we can look forward to a comfortable retirement. Not any more! The retirement age is being pushed up so we get fewer years. And the pressure is on to privatize as much of retirement as possible--including Social Security.

And yet private pensions are eroding at breakneck speed. Corporate pension plans lost between $300 billion and $500 billion over the past two years. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation--a quasi-governmental agency that insures corporate pension programs--is currently broke. By 2031, estimates are that companies will cover less than 10 percent of retirees’ health expenses. Already, 20 percent of companies have eliminated retiree medical plans for new hires, and 17 percent will require new hires to pay the full premium for coverage.

Faced with the impact of recession and cutthroat competition, management sees jettisoning pension plans as a tempting idea. According to The Economist magazine, "Pension liabilities have become a key element in corporate insolvencies and resurrection from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. U.S. Airways, for instance, America’s seventh-largest airline, was able to emerge from bankruptcy protection a few weeks ago only after shedding its pension obligations."

Pilots stripped of their retirement dreams only got angrier when they learned what happened to the CEO who ran U.S. Airways until just before the bankruptcy filing. Stephen Wolf left the company with a one-off pension payment of $15 million in his pocket.

Does the system work for us? Mired in recession and war, working Americans are having a rough time. At the end of the Cold War with the USSR in the early 1990s, Papa Bush promised us a "peace dividend" that would change our lives for the better. That was a pack of lies.

Now Baby Bush’s doctrine of a newly aggressive U.S. imperialism has dashed hopes that the trillion-dollar surplus would be used for national health care, higher teacher pay, secure pensions and revitalized cities--because the trillion-dollar surplus has become a huge deficit.

Like our bodies and our lives, this system grinds even our dreams into dust. We have to get rid of an economic and political system that increases hardship for the majority, while a tiny minority live in luxury.

If Corporate America couldn’t deliver for us in a period of capitalist expansion like the 1990s, it never will. We need to fight for a socialist system that puts the needs of ordinary people ahead of corporate profits.

Do American workers benefit from U.S. imperialism?

A NUMBER of people--both inside and outside the U.S.--think that American workers get material benefits from U.S. imperialism. Corporate America’s exploitation of workers in the economically less developed countries is believed to maintain and improve living standards here. And the U.S. military is said to defend the comfortable lifestyles of U.S. workers.

But the experience of the 1990s proves otherwise. Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. undertook to rebuild its confidence and ability to intervene militarily throughout world.

The U.S. government had suffered a humiliating defeat when it lost the Vietnam War. Ronald Reagan attempted to overcome the "Vietnam Syndrome" by invading Grenada in 1984 and bombing Libya in 1986. Papa Bush then invaded Panama in 1989 and ordered the first Gulf War in 1991.

Bill Clinton sought to occupy Somalia in 1993 and invaded Haiti in 1994. He used depleted uranium weapons to bomb Serbia, Kosovo, the Sudan and Afghanistan in the second half of the 1990s. Clinton also militarily enforced economic sanctions on Iraq that killed more than 1 million Iraqis during the 1990s. Baby Bush went on to raze Afghanistan in 2001 and launch the current military invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

So the past 20 years have been characterized by a global reassertion of U.S. military power. And hand in hand with this, U.S. economic power, with its "free trade" ideology, marched across the globe.

U.S. corporations extracted huge profits from almost every corner of the world in the 1990s. But as the declining living conditions of U.S. workers show, these profits didn’t trickle down to improve their lives.

Some observers argue that, without those profits, the decline in U.S. workers’ living standards would have been even greater. But the reality is that U.S. bosses robbed from U.S. workers everything they could get away with--just like they did from workers in less economically advanced countries. Downsizing, union-busting, benefit reductions, demands for labor flexibility and forced productivity gains were strategies used by U.S. corporations not only in foreign countries but also here at home to drain more out of workers.

The idea that U.S. workers live well because their brothers and sisters in less developed countries live poorly is plain wrong. The U.S. ruling class lives well--as do the ruling classes of the less-developed countries--because workers everywhere are exploited. The 1990s saw an expansion of U.S. economic and military imperialism. Big business benefited, and U.S. workers lost out.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/462/..._RichPoor.shtml (http://www.socialistworker.org/2003-2/462/462_06_RichPoor.shtml)

[Bolshevika]

Indeed, what is the difference between the Socialist worker and Capitalism magazine in regards to citing facts about capitalism?

[el_profe]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14 2004, 11:02 PM

From various government reports they find that: 46 percent of poor households actually own their homes; 76 percent have air conditioning; the typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities in Europe; nearly 75 percent of poor households own one car, and 30 percent own two or more cars; 97 percent have at least one color television; 62 percent have cable or satellite reception; and 25 percent have cell phones.

What's his definition of poor?
I dont know, what is your definition of poor, I think the point the writer is trying to make is that America's poor people, are the richest poor people in the world.

Look at the living space the poor in america have.
62% cable or satellite reception.
97% at least on color tv.

[el_profe]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14 2004, 11:10 PM
Indeed, what is the difference between the Socialist worker and Capitalism magazine in regards to citing facts about capitalism?
i doubt that you read either one of the articles.

[monkeydust]

Originally posted by el_profe+Jan 14 2004, 10:59 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (el_profe @ Jan 14 2004, 10:59 PM)
[email protected] 14 2004, 10:39 PM
All they are going to say is that this is capitalist "propaganda" and rule it out. You shouldn&#39;t have even bothered.
the stats are there, stats dont lie.
And this is not from fox, cnn or any other news source. [/b]
Don&#39;t forget El_profe that there are lies, there are damn lies and then they are statistics. Obviously statistics don&#39;t tend to lie, but they can be selctive, out of context and often used to argue mre than one side of an argument.

I&#39;ll be honest with you here, I only scan read that article, however it seemed to me to focus it&#39;s attention purely on a national scale. If the case in America is similar to that of Britian, more people are becoming rich on a national level but not at an international level.

With a more global economy, the poor, more and more often now live increasingly far away from the rich that thye benefit. To sustain itself capitalism needs the majority of people to be poor, even if this isn&#39;t true in one country, in a global sense it is.

Look at Africa today, someone posted in politics the extent to which farmers producing cocoa beans for chocolate are exploited being paid at rock bottom rates, simply to allow chocolate to be cheaper in our shops. Sure it saves money for the consumer but now the producer. The same can be said of many industries, we have more money because our products may be cheaper, but big business doesn&#39;t want to lose its money, rather it will cut costs by cutting pay and it&#39;s these primary industries largely in thirld world countries that lose out.

[el_profe]

Debt is a major source of worry and anxiety. No matter how hard or how long we work, it seems increasingly impossible to make ends meet each month. In the first three months of 2001, workers not only were unable to save, but used credit cards to spend 7 percent more than they earned. Personal debt is now at a record 120 percent of personal income in America.

But if we work hard, we’re told, at least we can look forward to a comfortable retirement. Not any more&#33; The retirement age is being pushed up so we get fewer years. And the pressure is on to privatize as much of retirement as possible--including Social Security.

And yet private pensions are eroding at breakneck speed. Corporate pension plans lost between &#036;300 billion and &#036;500 billion over the past two years. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation--a quasi-governmental agency that insures corporate pension programs--is currently broke. By 2031, estimates are that companies will cover less than 10 percent of retirees’ health expenses. Already, 20 percent of companies have eliminated retiree medical plans for new hires, and 17 percent will require new hires to pay the full premium for coverage.

Faced with the impact of recession and cutthroat competition, management sees jettisoning pension plans as a tempting idea. According to The Economist magazine, "Pension liabilities have become a key element in corporate insolvencies and resurrection from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. U.S. Airways, for instance, America’s seventh-largest airline, was able to emerge from bankruptcy protection a few weeks ago only after shedding its pension obligations."

Pilots stripped of their retirement dreams only got angrier when they learned what happened to the CEO who ran U.S. Airways until just before the bankruptcy filing. Stephen Wolf left the company with a one-off pension payment of &#036;15 million in his pocket.


This article as far as stats, most of their stats where of how much money the very very rich make.

Workers where unable to save? and they charged alot of money on their credit cards, of course they spend so much on going out a new big screen tv, dvd&#39;s, new cars, new computers. Most of the people in debt, they are in debt because they cant control their spending.
This guy wants to keep social security, hasnt he seen what a failure social security has been.
In chile privatization of the social security has worked pretty good.

About the lost jobs, he totally ignores 9-11, that was a huge blow to the USA economy.

And he talks about the pilots, is he talking about the same pilots that go(went) on strike like 4 times a year. also the airline industry was the hardest hit by 9-11. Abotu the CEO and his pension plan, I think pension plans are already set when they sign a contract. I also think some companies over pay their CEO&#39;s, but that is the companies loss if the CEO sucks and makes bad desicions for the company.

[BuyOurEverything]

I dont know, what is your definition of poor, I think the point the writer is trying to make is that America&#39;s poor people, are the richest poor people in the world.

Look at the living space the poor in america have.
62% cable or satellite reception.
97% at least on color tv.

There is no one definition of poor, that&#39;s a stupid question. But seeing as he gave stats as to what the &#39;poor&#39; in America had, I was wondering where he set the bar for poor.

[j.guevara]

ofcourse the richest country in the world has a better living standard for its poor people than poor people in poor countries, that doesnt legitimize the exploitation and ridiculously awful wealth distribution of america.

[Bolshevika]

Debt is something to seriously consider when considering the "luxuries" the poor and working people have. They could have some shitty little TV, but could be 50 thousand dollars in debt.

Just shows you that material wealth in capitalism is simply an illusion, just like a middle class.

And El_Profe: I skimmed through your article. Then I read who wrote it and dismissed it as partisan garbage.

[timbaly]

Sure the American poor has it better off than the poor of the underdeveloped world. The United States being the richest country the world has ever seen will obviously have higher living standards than many countries throughout the world, although it isn&#39;t number one. Regardless of the American poors living standards they are still exploited, though not nearly as much as third worlders.

I noticed that the article stated that 12.5 million Americans were considered to be poor Americans. 12.5 million Americans is also the amount of Americans living under poverty according to the federal government. Does anyone know how the US government measures who lives in poverty and who doesn&#39;t? With that information you will be able to tell what the word "poor" actually denotes.

[LSD]

The real point isn&#39;t so much that the "poor" in America lives better than the "poor" in, say, Angola.

That is to be expected.


The point is the gap between rich and poor. And that is wider in the US than anywhere.

While the article raves about the increasing living standards of the American poor, it fails to take into account the fact that in the same country live the richest people in the world. Based on the amount of wealth in private hands within the United States, every single American should be no tonly be living comfortably but well-beyond.

Of course the American worker lives well, the United States had 50% of the world&#39;s wealth.

What is shocking is how little of that wealth they actually have.

[el_profe]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15 2004, 01:33 AM
Sure the American poor has it better off than the poor of the underdeveloped world. The United States being the richest country the world has ever seen will obviously have higher living standards than many countries throughout the world, although it isn&#39;t number one. Regardless of the American poors living standards they are still exploited, though not nearly as much as third worlders.

I noticed that the article stated that 12.5 million Americans were considered to be poor Americans. 12.5 million Americans is also the amount of Americans living under poverty according to the federal government. Does anyone know how the US government measures who lives in poverty and who doesn&#39;t? With that information you will be able to tell what the word "poor" actually denotes.
no it was 35 million, I said it is 12.5% of the population.

[el_profe]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15 2004, 01:18 AM
Debt is something to seriously consider when considering the "luxuries" the poor and working people have. They could have some shitty little TV, but could be 50 thousand dollars in debt.

Just shows you that material wealth in capitalism is simply an illusion, just like a middle class.

And El_Profe: I skimmed through your article. Then I read who wrote it and dismissed it as partisan garbage.
so you didnt read it. you dont even know who the author is, how could you dismiss it as partisan garbage.

[ComradeRobertRiley]

12.7% of the USA lives below the poverty line.


Globastat (http://www.globastat.com/)

[Misodoctakleidist]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14 2004, 10:59 PM
the stats are there, stats dont lie.
:lol: idiot

The article seems to assume that wealth flow in america occurs in isolation from the rest of the world, this is absurd, very few people in america are really poor.

[Hampton]

While "poor" Americans don&#39;t live in opulence, they are surely not poor either by international or historical standards in our own country. I&#39;m betting if God condemned an unborn spirit to a lifetime of poverty but He left him free to choose the country in which to be poor, he&#39;d choose United States.

Translation: The poor should be happy to be happy to be in America despite the fact that they&#39;re poor. This whole paragraph means nothing except that they should be happy to be in America, glorifying bullshit that is meaningless to the article.


Here&#39;s Williams&#39; roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.

It&#39;s so simple when looking at it from the other side and not having to deal with having no money or food. This article doesn’t say it but we all know it, blacks live in the most poverty about 22.7 percent, once you know that and read the paragraph above we know who it&#39;s directed to. We have some fool telling people how to get ahead in life without taking into consideration race and class knowing that they matter to the person hiring them, the teacher trying to teach them and the cop pulling them over. It sounds so simple to go to school, get a job, get married and become happy in the middle class. It&#39;s all untrue though.

You probably won&#39;t finish school because it isn&#39;t worth the hassle of taking bullshit classes and teachers who take down to you, you won&#39;t get a job because you didn&#39;t finish school and if you do it&#39;ll be minimum wage and you&#39;ll quit within a week. After you quit you&#39;ll go to the street and start selling drugs and what&#39;s the common drug in the ghetto? Crack. So you&#39;ll sell that and then you&#39;ll get busted and arrested. But what most people don&#39;t know is that for selling 5 grams of crack you get the same time as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. Seems fair.

But you may say to yourself 65% of crack users are white, however, 92.6% of those convicted for crack crimes are black. Whoops&#33;

So you&#39;ll go to trial, get a public defender who falls asleep in court and go to jail for a decade at least, 20 years to life if it&#39;s your third offense.

And that&#39;s interesting because that&#39;s what happens more often than those who go to school and lead the perfect life illustrated above.

[el_profe]

Here&#39;s Williams&#39; roadmap out of poverty: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.

It&#39;s so simple when looking at it from the other side and not having to deal with having no money or food. This article doesn’t say it but we all know it, blacks live in the most poverty about 22.7 percent, once you know that and read the paragraph above we know who it&#39;s directed to. We have some fool telling people how to get ahead in life without taking into consideration race and class knowing that they matter to the person hiring them, the teacher trying to teach them and the cop pulling them over. It sounds so simple to go to school, get a job, get married and become happy in the middle class. It&#39;s all untrue though.

You probably won&#39;t finish school because it isn&#39;t worth the hassle of taking bullshit classes and teachers who take down to you, you won&#39;t get a job because you didn&#39;t finish school and if you do it&#39;ll be minimum wage and you&#39;ll quit within a week. After you quit you&#39;ll go to the street and start selling drugs and what&#39;s the common drug in the ghetto? Crack. So you&#39;ll sell that and then you&#39;ll get busted and arrested. But what most people don&#39;t know is that for selling 5 grams of crack you get the same time as someone selling 500 grams of powder cocaine. Seems fair.

But you may say to yourself 65% of crack users are white, however, 92.6% of those convicted for crack crimes are black. Whoops&#33;

So you&#39;ll go to trial, get a public defender who falls asleep in court and go to jail for a decade at least, 20 years to life if it&#39;s your third offense.

And that&#39;s interesting because that&#39;s what happens more often than those who go to school and lead the perfect life illustrated above.
the author of the article is black.
http://www.capmag.com/author.asp?name=15
Her are another 2 black"oppressed" authors, one of them grew up in south central L. A. and the other one didnt even finish high school, yet they where able to have succesfull carrers.
Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, he left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics.
http://www.capmag.com/author.asp?name=3

http://www.capmag.com/author.asp?name=5

They have good articles on rascism on this site: http://www.reasonvsracism.com/

I just put those authors info, so you can see that they didnt see it from the other side, they probably lived it.


As to black being sent to jail for crack, I think drugs should be legal, but the amouunt of anti-drgu agencies that depend on that money wont let drugs become legal.

It really is ridicolous that some violent criminals get out easier than people that sell drugs.

If you rape somone you can get out faster than if your caught selling drugs, same with child molesters. That is insane, the stupid "war on drugs" is not working. Just make it legal.

[Hampton]

The author could be green it wouldn&#39;t matter, he isn&#39;t saying things that should be said about poverty and the circumstances that come out of it. It&#39;s not helping anyone who dosen&#39;t follow his rules on becoming a member of the middle class. He dosen&#39;t mention redlining and gentrification either which is a problem to those who are buying houses and finding apartments.