A Good Read "The Black Boom' by Jason L. Riley

Birmingham MI

Description

A short encouragement to read: In his short and stimulating book, Jason L. Riley, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the biographer of Thomas Sowell, argues that, far from being a bigot, Donald Trump was a boon to blacks. During Trump’s first three years in office, Riley writes in The Black Boom, “median household incomes grew by 15.4 percent among blacks while growing by only 11.5 percent among whites.” By comparison, between 2009 and 2015, while Barack Obama was president, incomes rose 2.3 percent for blacks and 4.4 percent for whites. Riley writes that “the gains of blacks prior to the pandemic were unprecedented.” He cites research showing that an average of 400,000 new black wage earners entered the workforce in each year of Trump’s presidency, compared with 250,000 during Obama’s terms. Black unemployment in 2019 hit the lowest level on record. It’s not that Trump “set out to narrow racial inequality,” Riley writes. Instead, it was a case of a rising tide lifting all boats—but apparently lifting modest dinghies more. Trump’s “stated goal on the campaign trail was to grow the economy to the benefit of the working class,” and, in fact, wages of Americans in the 10th percentile (that is, the bottom tenth of earners) rose at a rate 50 percent greater than the wages of the average worker between 2017 and 2019. According to the Council of Economic Advisers, new lows in unemployment were “achieved for Asians, Hispanics, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, veterans, those without a high school degree, and persons with disabilities, among others.” Riley attributes these accomplishments to two Trump policies: the cut in the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, which took effect on the first day of 2018, and reductions in “regulations that he argued were weighing on economic growth,” especially in the energy sector.