Stephen Moore reports some interesting facts about the fate of Obama core voters under his policies in a recent Wall Street Journal column:
For better or worse, a truism of American politics is that voters vote their pocketbooks. Yet according to a new report on median household incomes by Sentier Research, in 2012 millions of American voters apparently cast ballots contrary to their economic self-interest.
Each month the consultants at Sentier analyze the numbers from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and estimate the trend in median annual household income adjusted for inflation. On Aug. 21, Sentier released "Household Income on the Fourth Anniversary of the Economic Recovery: June 2009 to June 2013." The finding that grabbed headlines was that real median household income "has fallen by 4.4 percent since the 'economic recovery' began in June 2009." In dollar terms, median household income fell to $52,098 from $54,478, a loss of $2,380.
What was largely overlooked, however, is that those who were most likely to vote for Barack Obama in 2012 were members of demographic groups most likely to have suffered the steepest income declines. Mr. Obama was re-elected with 51% of the vote. Five demographic groups were crucial to his victory: young voters, single women, those with only a high-school diploma or less, blacks and Hispanics. He cleaned up with 60% of the youth vote, 67% of single women, 93% of blacks, 71% of Hispanics, and 64% of those without a high-school diploma, according to exit polls.
According to the Sentier research, households headed by single women, with and without children present, saw their incomes fall by roughly 7%. Those under age 25 experienced an income decline of 9.6%. Black heads of households saw their income tumble by 10.9%, while Hispanic heads-of-households' income fell 4.5%, slightly more than the national average. The incomes of workers with a high-school diploma or less fell by about 8% (-6.9% for those with less than a high-school diploma and -9.3% for those with only a high-school diploma).
To put that into dollar terms, in the four years between the time the Obama recovery began in June 2009 and June of this year, median black household income fell by just over $4,000, Hispanic households lost $2,000 and female-headed households lost $2,300.
The unemployment numbers show pretty much the same pattern. July's Bureau of Labor Statistics data (the most recent available) show a national unemployment rate of 7.4%. The highest jobless rates by far are for key components of the Obama voter bloc: blacks (12.6%), Hispanics (9.4%), those with less than a high-school diploma (11%) and teens (23.7%).
This is a stunning reversal of the progress for these groups during the expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, and even through the start of the 2008 recession. Census data reveal that from 1981-2008 the biggest income gains were for black women, 81%; followed by white women, 67%; followed by black men, 31%; and white males at 8%.
In other words, the gender and racial income gaps shrank by more than in any period in American history during the Reagan boom of the 1980s and the Clinton boom of the 1990s. Women and blacks continued to make economic progress during the mini-Bush expansion from 2002-07. "Income inequality" has been exacerbated during the Obama era.
Mr. Obama has often contemptuously, and wrongly, branded the quarter-century period of prosperity beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan as a "trickle down" era. For many in the groups that Mr. Obama set out to help, a return to the prosperity of that era would be a vast improvement.
The Census Bureau data on incomes include cash government benefits, such as unemployment insurance, disability payments and the earned-income tax credit (but excludes Medicaid and food stamps). Most of the cash programs have surged in cost during the Obama presidency, yet incomes have still declined for the lowest-income eligible groups. This suggests that wages and salaries from employment have shrunk at an even faster pace than the Census data show. The shrinking paychecks of the past four years are consistent with two unwelcome anomalies of the recovery: a swift decline in labor-force participation to 63.4% from 65.5% during that period and a rise in part-time employment.
Rest of the column
Friday, September 6, 2013
Stephen Moore: blacks, single women, and minorities fared worse under Obama
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21 comments:
The most incompetent President of this country EVER.
Lets just call the numbers what they are. The dumbest of our population are the easiest to manipulate. This is how stupid these groups are. No matter how bad it gets they will still support a democrat. After the civil war all blacks were republican. Then democrats started flashing shiny objects in front of them and said,"Hey, look at these shiny trinkets. Those republicans are mean. If you come with us you can have all the shiny toys you want." Just like in the slave days they tricked them and got them back ubder control. Remember the Movie TRADING PLACES with Eddie Murphy? "WHISKEY...ALL YOU WANT" How stupid can one group be to go down the the clerks office and sign your name to a piece of paper that says, "Hey, sign me up for that political party that started the KKK and bought and sold my ancestors as slaves, then created the welfare system that enslaved us again." DUMB DUMB DUMB When the jews sign up for the Nazi party then we know all is lost.
How sad. What a WASTED opportunity. Hope and change my foot.... If they spent less time worrying so much about what whitey was up to and what whitey was up to 100 years ago and took "care of business" ALL of us would not be in such a hopeless situation.
So whats the difference between the republican and democrat partys? The republicans want you to be left alone. Do your thing and try to keep the govt away from you so you can achieve. The democrats want to keep giving you stuff. Free money, free health care, everything is free, so they say. Now anyone with common sense would know that something isnt right when you keep getting offered free stuff. Your BS bell should be ringing off the charts when you keep hearing FREE. There is always a segment of the population that believes the snake-oil salesman, not realizing that that FREE stuff comes with a price.
The Obama/Democrap divisiveness began with Hopey/Changey rhetoric. Obama drew his racial/radical redline early on, and has continued to drive his wedges. Substantial damages in racial and political relations have occurred.
1) Without the famously and historically inept trainwreck that was the Dubya Bush presidency, there would never have been a president Obama.
2) in 2012 millions of American voters apparently cast ballots contrary to their economic self-interest. This is referencing all the uneducated white Tea Party laborers voting for Romney in 2012, right?
3) This writer simply took economic numbers/stats from the last few years and then blamed all of it on Obama. A transparent and silly trick. How did these same minority groups do during, say, 2007-2008?
@2:18 you have a valid point with your 1st view. Obama is a clubfoot of the saul alinsky radical proliferation, who has had plenty of time, money, and political force to reconcile many mishaps and problems. He's good at community organizing under the mentoring of Alinsky and that is the sum of qualifications. He's not a leader, economist or foreign relations expert. About all he has accomplished is creating turmoil and dirtying up the "White" House.
Does anyone realize that when you have an economic collapse that those on the lower end of the ladder are going to end up worse? It is obviously not a known or recognized fact amongst conservatives that the order on the economic scale are White males, White females, and lastly Black females. Phrasing is everything. Being that conservatives are rarely self-respecting, they will say something happening under Obama rather than being more accurate and saying during the economic collapse. Honestly, its like blaming Obama for the effects of a tornado, earthquake and hurricane that happened a month before he took office. Ridiculously unreasonable.
"it is like blaming Obama for the weather". That's totally feasible, given his screw-ups, lies, corruptness, and his ego. Politics is politics, but Obama is a bald faced liar, and he has no shame. More lies to cover lies.
It's like being irrational, because that is exactly what conservatives are in regards to President Obama. I have never seen a group of people that refuse to be objective at all when it comes to an individual. Truth is, the only reason conservatives are looking up stats like this are because they are looking for something else to try and stick on Obama. Anyone that has EVER looked at stats like this know that Blacks and women always do the worst in an economy. It does not take a PhD in economy to know that in dire economic times, the bottom groups will be affected most.
Some of you all hate Obama so much that you never realized that a lot of what you are just realizing have always been the case. Now, you guys just want to try and hang it around Obama's neck. Pathetic.
It is hard to believe that intelligence can be understood in this group, but I continue to try. When you guys talk Democratic and Republican Party(s), do you r ealize that does not really say much. The more relevant terms would be conservative and liberal. Conservatives are the individuals that tried to and continue to oppose minorities and women. Conservatives once ran the Democratic Party, now they run the Republican Party. To act like Abe Lincoln was a Conservative just because he was a Republican is ridiculous. Freeing the slaves was a liberal position. Republicans want to have it both ways. They want to be proud conservatives today, but take credit for when the party was run by liberals. Intellectually dishonest....all of you.
6:04 your an idiot. Owning slaves is not a conservative position. That's about as liberal a position as you can get. Now that same group that kept blacks poor and uneducated to control them as slaves has done it again with the welfare laws. The sad case is now they are willing participants to their own demise. It's no one fault but your own you support these oppressive policy's. I have yet to see a Jewish person make an excuse for joining the nazi party. Oh yea.... That's because there are none so stupid as to join it. Maybe you should take note. Stupidity is a voluntary act and you signed your name on the dotted line at the clerks office.
If you are going to call someone an idiot, I recommend spelling you're correctly. Otherwise, you prove yourself to be one as well.
I think September 6, 2013 at 6:04 PM is repeating Donner's spiel from the JFP free labor intern convocation.
The Obama defenders are guzzing Koolaid furiously now.
He had a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress for his first two years. They gave him almost a trillion dollars in a "stimulation bill" for all those "shovel-ready" jobs he claimed were out there, just waiting for dollars to start percolating through the economy, putting everuone back to work.
You can make ad hominem attacks on conservatives all you want, but his economic results speak for themselves. His handling of the economy is what got our bond rating devalued. It got us a record low participation rate. it got us a record high use of food stamps and disability.
This is his economy, and he owns it.
I was one of the many whose pocket book was hit by Obama. In 2000 my husband gave his all for this country. As a result I draw a pension from the Army. From 2009 until 2012, I did not receive a raise plus had to pay taxes above what was being held out. In 2012 Obama announced I would be getting a 1.5% raise on 1/1/13. My net income is less now than it was when he went into office. Apparently I am one of the few who saw him for what he was and never voted for him. He is even worse than Jimmy Cater ever thought of being.
@ 5:50; Where does one get "...a PhD in economy"? You Millsaps students really need to start proofreading each others' stuff.
6:44pm Have you been hanging out with The Mad Hatter?
How on earth to you arrive at the position that owning slaves was a " liberal" position?
Please reply. I can't wait to hear your explanation.
Obama got the Affordable Care Act passed ( after Congress made it worse),approved killing bin Laden, rescued a few Americans in the clutches of terrorists, came of with a plan to rescue the automobile industry ( which worked),and came up with a stimulus package that unlike the Bush give away had strings attached and while not wildly successful seems to have helped. This was despite the fact that Congress will not approved a rational budget or approve any reforms or even minor appointments. The House of Representatives is the most dysfunctional legislative body in the world.
It's hard to argue a bad Presidency when the House blocks anything and everything.
We do know what Bush/Cheney gave us. The worst years of overspending in our history that is the reason for our deficit( everyone likes to forget the deficit was under control when Bush took office), a war with Iraq that was based on a contrived lie and was ill thought out and ended up giving Iran more cooperative next door neighbor,and laws that eroded our privacy and freedoms in the name of national security. We have the mess that is Guantanamo...again because thinking something through seemed too much trouble.
And, let's not forgot the TSA which , again, is growing like topsy and as ill thought out and poorly constructed as the war in Iraq.
I am not pleased with Obama, but I fail to understand how any rational person has such hatred for Obama and excuses Bush.
I find no rationality whatsoever in this contrived liberal/conservative nonsense when a GOP controlled administration spent like drunken sailors. Reducing taxes while increasing spending is not "conservative", it's stupid and irresponsible and totally unrelated to any recognizable political or economic philosophy. Willy nilly deregulation is not conservative, it's crazy. If you believe everyone is honorable and can operate without any rules , then I've got a $400 toilet seat I'd like to sell you!
We have people believing one big lie ( most of which are intended to frighten) after another ( the latest is that there is Sharia language in the Affordable Health Care Act)and everyone panics rather than bothering to check out the veracity of anything.
We have elected people who don't check out anything they are told and so believe things like women who are raped can't get pregnant and that shoving an electronic dildo up a woman's vagina will cause her to change her moral mindset and who think a poem is accurate history.
Two former drug addicts , neither of whom got past high school, influence our national dialogue and an atheist woman from Russia who slept her way into influence writing screen plays and fiction is hailed as an economic genius despite zero background in economics but rather study in Social Pedagogy. Her entire philosophy is based ultimately on the absurd notion that all individuals will be honorable and need no constraints.
We've thrown out centuries of learning and history and make decisions based on personality and charisma. We believe what we want to be true instead of what is true. And, we continue to do this expecting a different result.
Insanity
The most incompetent President of this country EVER.
Barack Obama’s comparison of the civil war in Syria with World War Two is one of the most ridiculous assertions by a US president in recent times. Great Britain during the Blitz was fighting for its very survival, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe and Nazi bombers bombarded British cities. The spectre of fascism threatened to engulf an entire continent, with more than a hundred million people already under the boot of Nazi German occupation. The United States had a fundamental national interest in helping halt Hitler’s drive for domination, but unfortunately chose not to get involved militarily until its declaration of war upon Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
To compare short-sighted American isolationism in the early 1940s to deep-seated, principled opposition today to a Syria intervention, trivialises the Second World War, simplifies the complexity of the Syrian civil war, and is insulting to the huge number of Americans who don’t agree with the White House’s stance on Syria. Britain in 1940, the mother country of the United States, is hardly Syria in 2013, and to suggest this is the case is mind-boggling. And to argue that firing a few cruise missiles as a shot “across the bow” against a dictator in the Middle East is the same thing as sending millions of combat troops across the Atlantic to liberate almost an entire continent is simply pathetic. And the president and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, have a shameful track record of appeasement of the Syrian regime that makes a mockery of their drive for war today.
Butthurt conservatives will never tire of trying to find ways to bitch about Obama.
I, however, am very tired of reading/listening to them whine about him.
But I will ask this: If Obama is the "most incompetent EVER," then where does Dubya Bush fall on your incompetence meter?
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