While Trump's 2nd-Term Agenda Would Help Black Lives, BLM Is Doing the Opposite
President Donald Trump announced his second-term agenda on Sunday.
As opposed to the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, many of the proposals laid out in Trump’s agenda would actually help black lives.
While Trump’s agenda focuses on defending the police, providing school choice and ending illegal immigration, BLM stands for defunding the police, destroying the nuclear family and transforming America into a socialist state.
Ironically, all of the proposals of Black Lives Matter would disproportionately harm black Americans.
FIGHTING FOR YOU: TRUMP CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCES PRESIDENT TRUMP’S 2ND TERM AGENDA!https://t.co/cRDHqic1vl
— Team Trump (Text VOTE to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 24, 2020
Trump Will Defend the Police
Of all the ideas BLM has proposed, none would have as much of an immediately disastrous impact as defunding the police.
On its website, the Marxist organization specifically lays out its plans for “defunding the police.”
“We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health, and education investments — we will never be truly safe,” BLM’s website reads.
Conversely, Trump plans to defend the police by fully funding and hiring more officers, increasing penalties for assaulting law enforcement officials and treating drive-by shootings as acts of domestic terrorism.
Keeping black communities safer will open up opportunities for those communities. More police presence means less crime. With less crime, businesses will feel safer investing in lower-income communities, many of which are majority black.
In the minds of BLM leaders and their supporters, however, police are inextricably influenced by racial bias.
Police departments could use more funding to better train their officers to deal with high-stress situations, which many cops face on a regular basis.
Instead, BLM would prefer to “invest” in government-sponsored health care, education and housing.
Government intervention into housing has caused more problems for lower-income communities, not fewer. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing,” according to the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Government health care creates many of its own unintended consequences as well.
Lastly, despite the fact that education funding per student has increased by over $10,000 in the past 60 years, student outcomes have remained flat.
School Choice Offers Equal Opportunities in Education
This lack of improvement in the public education system is partially due to the fact that public schools have very few incentives to improve given that they have a monopoly on many of the children in their districts.
Trump proposes to fix this problem by expanding school choice to include every child. School choice redirects education funding straight to the student; rather than forcing children in lower-income areas to go to the public school in their area, a school choice option would allow parents to choose the best educational opportunity available, whether that be a private school, a charter school or even perhaps a public school outside of their area.
Not only would this empower parents to be able to find the best educational opportunities for their children, but it would also create competition for failing public schools, incentivizing them to find ways to increase educational achievement among their students.
Lower-income families, which are disproportionately black, would no longer be stuck if their local school was incompetent. Those parents would have a chance to send their children to the best schools that typically only students living in higher-income communities would be able to attend.
Unfortunately, the BLM-supported Democrats oppose school choice because of their strong relationship with teachers unions. Teachers unions oppose school choice because, to put it quite frankly, bad teachers would be out of a job and bad schools could possibly be closed down. To them, protecting bad teachers is more important than uplifting black lives.
BLM Wants To Destroy the Family
One of the core proposals found on the “What We Believe” page on the Black Lives Matter website is the disruption of the nuclear family.
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” the site reads.
Disrupting the family is the opposite of what black America needs right now — much of the suffering African-Americans face today is due to a disruption in the traditional family structure.
Many BLM supporters may believe that the aftereffects of slavery and Jim Crow are responsible for current racial disparities, but the reality of the situation is far more complicated.
Instead, the evidence clearly shows that fatherlessness, incentivized by welfare, has been a much bigger impediment to black economic mobility than generational poverty caused by discrimination.
In a Prager U educational video titled “Black Fathers Matter,” conservative commentator Larry Elder provided that evidence.
“Economist Walter Williams has written that: ‘According to Census data from 1890 to 1940, a black child was more likely to grow up with married parents than a white child,'” Elder said in the video. “For blacks, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 25 percent in 1965 to 73 percent in 2015.”
That rise in fatherlessness happened over a period during which racism was clearly becoming less prominent. Instead, the catalyst was the rise of the welfare state. Various welfare programs have created incentives for mothers to stay single, prompting fathers to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities to raise their children.
Former President Barack Obama himself put it well in a 2008 speech about fatherhood in the black community.
“You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children,” Obama said, according to Politico. “We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.
“How many times in the last year has this city lost a child at the hands of another child? How many times have our hearts stopped in the middle of the night with the sound of a gunshot or a siren? How many teenagers have we seen hanging around on street corners when they should be sitting in a classroom? How many are sitting in prison when they should be working, or at least looking for a job? How many in this generation are we willing to lose to poverty or violence or addiction? How many?”
Despite these facts, instead of encouraging black fathers to take responsibility for their children, Black Lives Matter wants to “disrupt” the family unit entirely.
Trump’s Agenda Would Help Black Lives; BLM’s Wouldn’t
In addition to the above, the president’s agenda also lists ending illegal immigration, creating more jobs and bringing manufacturing jobs back from China as a few of the president’s top priorities in his second term.
All of these proposals would create more opportunities for low-skill American workers to enter and move up in the workforce, both through creating jobs and by preventing illegal immigrants from taking jobs that would otherwise be occupied by natural-born low-skill American workers.
Black Lives Matter doesn’t want people to succeed in our society, however. It wants to dismantle our capitalist systems and remake them in the form of a Marxist utopia where everyone is equal and no one is free.
It’s time for America to wake up to the reality of the Black Lives Matter movement — it isn’t saving black lives.
Instead, it’s using black lives to further its political agenda.
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