When Will Obama Do the Right Thing By America's Black Youth?

Time for a Constitutional amendment:
assuring the right to a job at a living wage 

Youth unemployment in America has grown throughout the depression as older, more experienced workers have been increasingly driven to compete with workforce entrants for low-skill and poorly paid jobs. Among black youth (aged 16 to 24) the official unemployment rate is around 40% although, if discouraged workers are included, the actual rate may be twice that.

How then do young blacks react when apparently excluded from the world of work? Black males have never been accused of lacking balls, so it should be a matter for no surprise if many of them take to mugging white people, stealing cars and dealing drugs, with the corollary that many of them are sent to jail (at a cost to the taxpayer of $30,000 per convict per year) where they learn the customs and creed of the hardened criminal.

Unemployed youths who avoid trouble with the law are nevertheless a burden on society, being largely if not entirely dependent on the taxpayer for food, clothing, healthcare and lodging. In addition, the existence of a great underclass of unemployed or underemployed Americans, both young and old, necessitates a huge welfare bureaucracy that adds an enormous overhead to the cost of welfare.

Failing to acquire workforce skills, many unemployed youths of today will become the long-term unemployed adults of tomorrow, insuring a snowballing increase in the proportion of the population that is economically dysfunctional, criminally inclined and deeply disillusioned about the society in which they live.

What then to do?

Simple: legislate the right of every citizen to work at a living wage.

How?

As I have described here and here and here. Which is to say, by means of a wage subsidy program that will achieves three things:

• (1) Drive the cost of employing a marginal worker to below the value of that worker's labor: the essential condition for employment in the private sector;


• (2) Provide marginal workers the opportunity to raise their workforce skills and thus increase their earnings potential and their contribution to the economy;


• (3) Create a vast low-wage labor resource that will stimulate rates of business formation and expansion.

In addition, a wage subsidy program will save hugely in welfare costs and the costs of crime and other forms of social dysfunction, to an extent that greatly exceeds the cost of the subsidy.

Needless to say, the imperialist warmongers, Zionists stooges and and Wall Street operatives who run the US, Canada, and Britain, don't give a damn about the poor or the taxpayer and will give not the slightest thought to this self-evident solution to the West's chief social and economic problem.

In fact, what the ruling elite hope for is that the faces of the poor be, not ground, but underground, pending which desired state, they are to be fed on the crumbs from the bankers tables, but otherwise  left to fester, while they're place in society is taken by hungrier, more energetic, Third World immigrants, with no conception of the rule of law, the rights of man, freedom of speech or constitutional government: a new people, in other words, for a new regime of plutocratic despotism.