Comments on: Obama versus Tim Scott on the black experience in America

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 21:44:26 +0000

None of the social safety net had yet been enacted. I remember when my grandparents got their first Social Security check in 1951. Social Security began in 1935, but the average life expectancy then was 61. So, not many people actually collected.
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I take it the years 1933-40 were a part your youth. The median age at first marriage for men of the 1933 cohort was about 23 years, so the world you grew up in would have extended from 1933 to 1956.
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By ‘the average life expectancy’, I take it you’re referring to the life expectancy at birth, which was once strongly influenced by infant and early childhood deaths. In 1940, about 60% of white men of the 1875 cohort were still alive and such people had a life expectancy of about 12 years.
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Food Stamp Program of 1964, Medicaid and Medicare of 1965, LBJ’s War on Poverty of 1964, Earned Income Tax Credit of 1975, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families of 1996, etc.
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The programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity were dismantled over the period running from 1973 to 1981. There’s a residue in HHS. Federal intervention in housing markets and primary and secondary schooling were disagreeably enhanced during the Johnson years, but neither publicly provided primary and secondary schooling nor public housing nor ‘urban renewal’ were innovations of the Johnson Administration. (‘Urban renewal’ is largely gone and public housing has been largely replaced with voucher programs).
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Federal nutrition programs, foremost among them SNAP, are inadvisable. They’re dwarfed by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. (As late as 2019, SNAP beneficiaries received about $4,300 per household per year).
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TANF replaced AFDC. As we speak, the TANF rolls have about 2 million people on them. The AFDC rolls were at their peak around 1992, when they had 12 million people on them. AFDC was founded in 1935 as an appendix to Social Security, though it wasn’t of much consequence during the period running from 1935 to 1958.
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EITC, like SNAP, is dwarfed by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The average household which benefits receives just north of $2,000 a year.
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The big and abiding innovation since 1940 has been Medicare, Medicaid (NB Medicaid partially replaced state asylums), and Social Security Disability.

By: JJ

JJ — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 19:15:20 +0000

Art D.: “Unless you’re a centenarian, no you didn’t.”

Born in 1933. Not quite a centenarian. None of the social safety net had yet been enacted. I remember when my grandparents got their first Social Security check in 1951. Social Security began in 1935, but the average life expectancy then was 61. So, not many people actually collected.

Food Stamp Program of 1964, Medicaid and Medicare of 1965, LBJ’s War on Poverty of 1964, Earned Income Tax Credit of 1975, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families of 1996, etc.

All occurred in my lifetime. I remember when doctors posted prices for various services in their offices. I remember our local doctor trading his care for services that his patients could provide. I remember the local churches raising money for people who were temporarily out of work. I remember hospitals putting people on payment plans to pay for expensive surgeries, etc. It was not a bad system and it required people to be more responsible than they are today.

You know a lot, but you don’t know it all.

By: Jimmy

Jimmy — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 18:36:49 +0000

For a professional writer, Erickson sure mangled this sentence: “Barack Obama has decided to call out Senator Tim Scott for dismissing America as a racist nation.” I presume he meant something like, “Barack Obama has decided to call out Senator Tim Scott for his dismissal of the idea that America is a racist nation.”

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:09:26 +0000

It means the blacks are living a normal American existence,
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It says something about the political culture. Doesn’t mean much about the common life generally.
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Many blacks are leading a normal existence. Many are not. The nexus of interests and passions in and around the Democratic Party is generated by people who are bound and determined to do nothing effective to reduce the level of abnormality among those who are not. Indeed, they’re committed to making the whole world increasingly unjust, abusive, and bizarre.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 17:06:10 +0000

I grew up in a society where there was no welfare, no Medicaid, no Social Security. Even in those days, people got help -from family, from neighbors, from churches, and some charitable organizations. There was no Big Brother to care for the poor.
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Unless you’re a centenarian, no you didn’t.
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Subsidized services and income transfers accounted for a much smaller share of gross domestic product in 1928 than they do today. They were certainly present. These included public schools (primary, secondary, tertiary), state sanatoriums, state workhouses, city hospitals, state asylums, state orphanages, federal veterans’ hospitals, and veterans’ pensions. The Depression saw the advent of relief payments and unemployment compensation.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 16:57:37 +0000

“Systemic racism” is sociological phlogiston.
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My suspicion about BO and Mooch is that they were never particularly well-grounded and they’ve been subject to so much flattery over the last 20 years (and, to a degree, during the 20-odd years previous) that they don’t know who they are anymore. See Mooch’s employment history over the period running from 1991 to 2008, which is not that of someone subject to operational measures of performance. See Obama’s political career. There you see well-timed dirty tricks, massive fundraising, the collapse of the distinction between the media and Democratic Party press agents, and the schemes of various people in tech and finance. His remarks in response to Scott are absurd. He no longer recognizes what is absurd.
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By: Barry Meislin

Barry Meislin — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 07:59:18 +0000

“…it’s not a wicked solution…”

It’s plenty wicked.
Though some might prefer “evil”.
Take yer pick.
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
“…a generation or two.”
Gosh, I wish I could be so optimistic….
(Since I believe that the theme song for the Democrats is, “Racism yesterday, racism today, racism tomorrow, racism FOREVER…”
Catchy, ain’t it?! By the way, because it’s FOREVER, it excuses—promotes, rather— anti-white racism—REPARATIONS!! you understand—which of course includes anti-WHITE-SUPREMACISTS OF COLOR…)

Reminds one of Schicklegruber’s “I DECIDE who’s a JEW”…

By: Instapundit » Blog Archive » BARRACK OBAMA HAS NO COMMONALITY WITH THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA: Obama versus Tim Scott on t

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 07:00:08 +0000

[…] BARRACK OBAMA HAS NO COMMONALITY WITH THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA: Obama versus Tim Scott on the black experience in America. […]

By: Paul Nachman

Paul Nachman — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:52:12 +0000

From http://jonathanlast.com/american-narcissus/

A reader passes along this fantastic bit from a 2004 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama in the Atlantic:

I couldn’t help noticing, when we sat down to talk in the dilapidated storefront that houses his Springfield campaign headquarters, that the blue-pen drawing he’d doodled on his newspaper during fundraising calls was a portrait of himself.

Jonathan Last’s full November 2010 article about Obama, “American Narcissus,” is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110216121757/http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/american-narcissus_516686.html [click through to two following pages]

By: Abraxas

Abraxas — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:47:15 +0000

If I were Obama I would have sat this out, but apparently he really does believe that his ideology gives him greater insight into African-American life than actual African-Americans have. One doesn’t rise to the top in politics without having similarly exalted opinions about oneself.

The Democratic Party, though, depends on racism and White Supremacy. It’s their master narrative. The civil rights narrative and talk of forever endangered rights has been applied to women, and LGBTQ, and other people of color, and even the environment, so whenever a Democrat talks about anything it tends to be in those terms.

Still, BHO should have known better not to go after Scott personally. He comes off sounding a little like Glenn Kessler who attacked Scott for talking about his childhood poverty when an ancestor of his had once owned much farmland (Kessler’s family owned or ran Royal Dutch Shell, one of the largest corporations in the world).

“Systemic racism” isn’t racist prejudice. It’s another way of saying inequality. If you want an activist government redistributing wealth, “systemic racism” is what you talk about. Bigotry may wane, but so long as there are wealth differences between ethnic groups, Democrats can frame their plans as opposition to racism.