Drudge Misleads Headline About Income Inequality!

I for one am getting tired of The Guy Who Throws Shit On The Wall and his conservative agitating.

He's entitled to attract his rabid base of WHITE EXTREMISTS and misinformed readers with his website.

Most of the Republican Party takes marching orders from him, the folks over at Loserville, King Hippo, Chalk E Becker, and now Crazy Jones. It's no secret that a handful of Republican politicos are drafting legislation based off these highly paid luntics of the junk food media.

While they're screaming that the media is in the tank for President Barack Obama, their gullible audience continues to shell out dollars for books, events, and products endorsements.

To put this in simple words: We'll scream so much and yes, we've gotten very wealthy by doing it!

In the link, the New York Times tells a tale of income inequality between two common groups Republicans rather see in the iron college instead of the voting booths.

The median income for Blacks and Hispanics have taken a nosedive for over 50 years. Further than we thought though. In the age of Barack Obama, many Republicans and their conservative/White supremacists allies believe the minorities are "brainwashed" into supporting the president because he's a "brotha".

The New York Times cited a study from the Urban Institute saying that White families make an average of $2 for every Blacks and Hispanics that makes $1. This situation has been around for 30 years.

Newsflash, Ronald Reagan was the president back then.

The title is misleading for one thing. It's not true.

One thing about the U.S. Congress these days, they're not popular. Right now, the Kardashians are slightly more likable than members of Congress.

Since the background check vote failed, members of the U.S. Senate who voted against it have taken nosedive in popularity. Republicans and Democrats who voted against gun control really are paying a price.

This inequality gap that stiffed Black and Hispanic families continue to reign because of lawmakers failing to do their part to their constituents. Gerrymandering and lack of knowledge continues to elect these politicos back to Washington. Despite their commitment to helping their country by making progress, our politicos are really more interested in helping their friends, family and allies instead of you and me.

That link will give those in the junk food media and the conservative/White supremacist bubble a "told you so moment!" They will waste no time trying to tie every economic woe to the president.

The president released a budget bill that Republicans refuse support. The president's job bill died in 112th Congress. This wasn't moving the Republicans in the House and the Senate passed it only to have it watered down because of conservative Democrats phobias of a Republican insurgency.

The low approved Congress managed to stall the immediate cuts by the Federal Aviation Administration.

They realized that the cuts were hurting their travel by air. They quickly passed legislation and the president signed into law. The president grumbled about this and told the American people that if we're elected to do a job, why are we not working to get things done?

The point of the income inequality started when Whites left the urban areas for the suburbs. Why buy in the city when there's malls, hospitals and parks in the suburbs?

I've heard White friends say they avoid going to the city because of some perceived phobia they've watched on the local news or from experience of friends or family members living there.

The Urban Institute concluded that when it comes to wealth — as measured by assets, like cash savings, homes and retirement accounts, minus debts, like mortgages and credit card balances — white families have far outpaced black and Hispanic ones. Before the recession, non-Hispanic white families, on average, were about four times as wealthy as nonwhite families, according to the Urban Institute’s analysis of Federal Reserve data. By 2010, whites were about six times as wealthy.

The dollar value of that gap has grown, as well. By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.

“The racial wealth gap is deeply rooted in our society,” said Caroline Ratcliffe, one of the authors of the Urban Institute study. “It’s here, it’s not going away, and we need to care about it.”

Many experts consider the wealth gap to be more pernicious than the income gap, as it perpetuates from generation to generation and has a powerful effect on economic security and mobility. Young black people are much less likely than young white people to receive a large sum from their parents or other relatives to pay for college, start a business or make a down payment on a home, for instance. That, in turn, makes their wealth-building prospects shakier as they move into adulthood.

Two major factors helped to widen this wealth gap in recent years. The first is that the housing downturn hit black and Hispanic households harder than it hit white households, in aggregate. Many young Hispanic families, for instance, bought homes as the housing bubble was inflating and reaching its peak, leaving them saddled with heavy debt burdens as house prices plunged in places like suburban Phoenix and inland California.

Black families also were hit disproportionately by the housing collapse, because heading into the recession housing constituted a higher proportion of their wealth than for white families, leaving them more exposed when the market crashed. Higher unemployment rates and lower incomes among blacks left them less able to keep paying their mortgages and more likely to lose their homes, experts said.

Discriminatory lending practices were also a factor. “We know that communities of color, their rate of subprime or predatory loans was twice what it is in the overall population,” said Tom Shapiro, the director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

Black families also suffered bigger hits to their retirement savings, the Urban Institute found. On aggregate, the value of black families’ retirement accounts shrank 35 percent between 2007 and 2010, while white families’ accounts actually gained 9 percent over the same period. With lower earnings and higher unemployment rates leaving them with a thinner safety net to begin with, black families were more likely to take funds out of the market when it was depressed, leaving them out in the cold as the market recovered.

“That reservoir of what you can dig into for emergencies and contingencies is a lot shallower in communities of color,” Professor Shapiro said. “That pushes black families to sling off assets, like I.R.A.’s or stocks, that you might have had another goal in mind for.”

The Guy Who Throws Shit On The Wall tweets a picture with former Bill Clinton nemesis (alleged mistress) Paula Jones. They were spotted at the 2013 White House Correspondents Dinner.

Something similar may be happening as the housing recovery takes hold. “Some people talk about it in terms of a land grab,” said Professor Hamilton of the New School, as mainly white investors are buying foreclosed homes from disproportionately minority owners. “As the housing market starts to appreciate, some of those minority buyers might not be back.”

All in all, Hispanic families lost 44 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010, the Urban Institute estimates, and black families lost 31 percent. White families, by comparison, lost 11 percent of their wealth. The economic turbulence worsened a gap that has persisted for as long as social scientists have measured it, and has its roots in institutional racism, they said, which, for instance, prevented black Americans from benefiting fully from the G.I. Bill back in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Urban Institute study looked at mean wealth figures, where a small number of high-net-worth families skews the averages upward. Median wealth figures — where half of households have more wealth and half less — produces lower numbers, but the trends are the same, the Urban Institute researchers said.

Even if blacks and Hispanics make progress in the years ahead as the economy improves, the persistence of the wealth gap has pushed many public policy scholars to recommend the adoption of more ambitious programs to help reduce worsening inequality.

The Urban Institute suggests reforming government policies that encourage savings but disproportionately benefit the already wealthy and families with high incomes, like the home mortgage interest deduction. Automatic savings vehicles also might help lower-income and lower-wealth families start saving, it said.

Professor Hamilton has proposed “baby bonds,” granting savings accounts to infants, seeded with funds that allocate greater sums to families with less wealth. (Such accounts would be race-blind, Professor Hamilton emphasized.) Accountholders could tap that money as young adults, to pay for college or start a business.

“That’s really going to break the link of intergenerational poverty, and the intergenerational wealth gap,” Professor Hamilton argued.

But in the absence of such far-reaching measures, scholars and advocates remain generally pessimistic that the wealth gap will narrow even as members of minority groups increase their share of the American work force.

“The growth in the wealth divide is going to be very hard to close,” said Dedrick Muhammad, the senior director of the economic department at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the civil rights organization. “I don’t have a positive feeling about racial wealth inequality resolving itself with the recovery.”