Liberal policies harm black Americans

For several decades now, Democrats have been the political party of choice for the overwhelming majority of black Americans. But why? The progressive policies pushed by Democratic leaders have failed dreadfully at helping black people, stifling their economic mobility, restricting educational options, limiting job opportunities and drastically harming prospects for success.

Minimum wage and living wage laws, for example, purport to help black workers, but they actually do little more than reduce the number of available jobs - especially for young, low skill and minority workers. Affirmative Action sets minorities up to fail by placing them in academic institutions or jobs where they are not qualified.

Oppressive regulations make it nearly impossible for many would-be black entrepreneurs to start businesses and live the American Dream. Rent controls limit the number and quality of homes available in many American cities - particularly in majority black areas. Democrats' senseless opposition to school choice leaves promising students trapped in failing schools.

Gun control laws fail to reduce gun violence and prevent many of the disproportionate number of black Americans who are killed by guns from defending themselves. Even Democrats' hostility towards Social Security privatization particularly harms blacks since African Americans generally have shorter life expectancies than whites and, because of poorer job opportunities, are less likely to accumulate wealth than other Americans.

If fact, despite spending $15 trillion on policies aimed at benefiting black Americans over the past 50 years it's hard to find a single liberal policy with any positive results.

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You may be thinking: "Liberal policies may have failed black Americans, but what have those horrible, racist Republicans ever done for black people?" Well, there is one small fact about the Republican Party being founded to end slavery - and then succeeding in doing so. Oh, and the GOP also ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution granting citizenship and the right to vote to black Americans. (Of course many black people couldn't exercise their voting rights because Democrats implemented a number of barriers, including poll taxes, registration fraud, literacy tests and physical violence to keep black voters from the polls for the better part of a century.)

Republicans also enacted monumental civil rights protections in 1866 and 1875 - and passed the Civil Rights Acts of the 1950s and 1960s by a far greater percentage than Democrats. Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president, sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools, and his appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended school segregation.

To be fair, Democrats left their mark on America's black community, as well. Unlike, Republicans, however, the impact of Democrats has almost always been a negative one.

Democrats fought to preserve slavery and founded the Ku Klux Klan. Democratic politicians ushered in Jim Crow laws, creating segregation throughout the South. George C. Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, blocked a door at the University of Alabama in an attempt to prevent black students from enrolling. Two Democratic presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, rejected anti-lynching laws, and another, Lyndon Johnson, referred to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as "that [N-word] preacher."

Throughout American history, the Republican Party has done far more to advance the civil rights and establish fairer, more equal treatment of black Americans than Democrats. That is still true today.

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Louisiana state Sen. Elbert Guillory explained the failures of Democratic Party and liberal policies during his announcement that he was leaving the Democratic Party to become the first black Republican state senator in Louisiana since Reconstruction.

Declaring the Democratic Party the "party of disappointment," Guillory proclaimed that, "at the heart of liberalism is the idea that only a great and powerful big government can be the benefactor of social justice for all Americans. But the left is only concerned with one thing - control. And they disguise this control as charity. Programs such as welfare, food stamps, these programs aren't designed to lift black Americans out of poverty, they were always intended as a mechanism for politicians to control the black community.

The idea that blacks, or anyone for that matter, need the government to get ahead in life is despicable. And even more important, this idea is a failure. Our communities are just as poor as they've always been. Our schools continue to fail children. Our prisons are filled with young black men who should be at home being fathers. Our self-initiative and our self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them."

Sen. Guillory is just one of many black Americans who now recognize that Democratic politicians have betrayed the black community and liberal policies have left them worse off.

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