Jason Riley on the history of black poverty and the family in America

Jason Riley: Let's look at poverty. Between 1940 and 1960, black poverty in America fell by 40 percentage points... in 20 years. That's before the Civil Rights Act, before Voting Rights Act, before Brown v. Board of Education... Now it continued to fall through the '70s and '80s, but at a much slower rate. You had a much stronger black family coming out of slavery, throughout Reconstruction, into Jim Crow. Two parent households were much more likely among blacks than what you have today. And in some years, according to census, two parent households... the rate exceeded that of whites. The difference today, and I would argue largely as a result of these efforts to help blacks, you have seen the disintegration of the black family. And until blacks repair that damage - and there is significant damage there - I don't see how these other outcomes are going to improve. 

Nick Gillespie: What can the government do? 

Riley: It's not about what I want the government to do; it's what I want the government to stop doing. Stop raising the minimum wage and pricing blacks out of the labor force. Stop mismatching kids with schools in the form of affirmative action and setting them up to fail. Stop trying to replace a father in the home with a government check. 

~ Jason Riley, "Black Americans Failed by Good Intentions: An Interview with Jason Riley," 5:38 mark, Reason TV, September 3, 2014

Jason Riley on the race industry in America

We're not post-racial, but I'd argue that the Left has no interest in being post-racial. They claim they want to be post-racial, but they really don't. They want to keep race front and center in our national conversations, because it serves their agenda that racism is the all-purpose explanation for what ails black America. There are a lot of people making a lot of money on that narrative, and they want to keep it out there. There are political parties who gain and keep political power with that narrative out there, and they want to keep talking about it.

~ Jason Riley, "Black Americans Failed by Good Intentions: An Interview with Jason Riley," 17:22 mark, Reason TV, September 3, 2014

Nick Gillespie on the big spending Trump administration

Last week, The New York Times published an eye-opening tally of how much more the federal government is spending on each of us since Donald Trump was elected president.  "Total federal spending has increased by $1,441 per person since 2016,"... to a grand total of $14,652 per person per year.  They came to their numbers by looking at actual federal outlays "for the 2016 fiscal year, adjusting for inflation and population changes" and comparing them to the budgeted amounts for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

This revelation—which has generated a scant 45 comments as of this writing on five days after publication—should discomfit both Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals/progressives. And it should absolutely enrage libertarians who believe in smaller government...

~ Nick Gillespie, "How Much More Should Trump be Spending on You?," Reason.com, February 16, 2020