The Black-White wealth gap is widening, according to data from the 2013 U.S. Census Bureau report. Roland Martin and a NewsOne Now panel examines how income inequality continues to speed by Black households at such a staggering rate.
“With the housing crisis and the loss of homes, people lost their number one asset. In America, everyone’s number one asset is their home and the equity in that home. And once you lose that equity, you lose that net worth and that’s what happened to Black America for the last decade or so,” Eugene Craig III, CEO of the Eugene Craig Organization, said in response to the data.
Lauren Victoria Burke, a political journalist, added, “It hasn’t been a help at all that our politicians, frankly, don’t have a policy for poverty. President Obama rarely talked about poverty, didn’t care about the issue, never spoke on it. Currently, Donald Trump doesn’t talk about poverty. We have one in every seven Americans living in poverty, over 40 million people. It wasn’t helpful that President Obama didn’t pay attention to the Bush tax cut rate and effectively turned down four trillion over 10 years in revenue with the fiscal cliff deal.”
Burke argues that Obama and Democrats are not the only one to blame for failing to address poverty, Republicans also failed to develop strategies. The analyst also mentioned that the country’s poorest states, Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia, are headed by GOP leadership, using that as an example that politicians on both sides of the aisle are failing to address the matter.
Don Calloway, CEO of Pine Streets Strategies, chimed in with, “a big part of the problem is it’s not a sexy thing electorally to talk about the poor and to talk about the idea of poverty. We’re very caught up on both sides of the political spectrum in talking about the middle class and advancing the middle class.”
Watch NewsOne Now with Roland Martin, in its new time slot on TV One.
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Blacks Fare Economically Worse Than Whites, Asians & Hispanics was originally published on newsone.com
