DORI MONSON

A theory on why black households aren’t thriving in Seattle

Nov 14, 2014, 8:37 AM | Updated: 8:38 am

Taken from Thursday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio.

There is a story in The Seattle Times that is another indictment of our politicians around Seattle.

Have you seen what is happening to black families in Seattle? This is as stunning a set of statistics as you will ever read.

Seattle’s median income is at an all-time high, $70,000. The one group that has been completely left behind is black families in Seattle.

“While Seattle’s median household income soared to an all-time high of $70,200 last year, wages for blacks nose-dived to $25,700 — a 13.5 percent drop from 2012. Among the 50 largest U.S. cities, Seattle now has the ninth lowest income for black households.”

The black family median income is only a third of the citywide median income and 35 percent below the national average for black households, according to The Times.
So why, when we have all these compassionate liberals running the city, is this one of the worst cities in the country for black households?

I have several theories. I’ve told you that Seattle is headed to being a city of very wealthy and very poor people. The middle class cannot survive given current political leadership in Seattle.

We have followed and embraced the same economic path as San Francisco where there is no middle class. That path is to focus on the developers, on the corporations that want things like a street car line, things like Sound Transit that steals money from the people to give to the wealthy property developers, or the Alaskan Way Viaduct which is coming down for wealthy waterfront owners. It’s a city that caters to the very wealthy because they help fund all of these liberals’ political campaigns and careers.

We also have a political system that is designed to try to ensure people stay in the lowest quintile economically. If we give them $15 an hour, maybe they’ll shut up and stay happy and stay right where they’re at. We don’t want people to have ambition to climb out of poverty and get to a better place because then they may just move away from being a solid, dependable voting block for these politicians.

Also, we have decided to give away a lot of social services in this city to illegals. So Seattle has become very much a magnet destination. We’re a sanctuary city. We’re a sanctuary county. Police making roadside stops aren’t allowed to ask immigration status, so you have a lot of people migrating to this area knowing it is a sanctuary region. According to The Seattle Times article, the immigrant population does play a huge role in these stats.

“Seattle’s overall black population has held steady in number, at around 47,000. But the composition of that population changed dramatically with the arrival of a new wave of émigrés from Africa — particularly Ethiopia and Eritrea — who settled mostly in Rainier Valley. […]

“Many of those immigrants are low-wage workers, which has contributed to the overall decline in income for black households here.”

Isn’t it interesting that we have people like Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant who get elected with this pitch that they’re the party of the working class, and yet the poor do significantly worse under their leadership.

This is the same thing happening nationally with President Obama. The poor have done historically bad the last six years nationally. We have more people on food stamps than ever before, have more people in poverty, we’ve spent trillions of dollars on the war on poverty.

But the bottom line is, as long as we convince people that government is the solution to their economic future, that government somehow will be their savior, that government will provide for them, that government will eke them by as long as they keep voting for us, people lose the need to market themselves, to acquire the skills that allow them to climb out of poverty.

I had to climb out of poverty. I was in the poorest 1/20th of Seattle when I was a kid. If I had relied on government, if I had said I just want enough to barely get by as long as somebody else gives it to me, I would have had no shot of climbing out.

But we have a political class nationally and locally that has decided that they’re going to keep spinning this dream for people and now the stats prove how much of a fallacy that dream is.

Taken from Thursday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio.

JS

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A theory on why black households aren’t thriving in Seattle