“When [social security] was first established, you had 40 workers for every retiree. Today, we have three workers for every retiree. You also have people living longer, and you have all people forced into this system that they don’t own … and they can’t transfer it to their heirs,” says Star Parker. She is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) and editor of the book “The State of Black Progress.”
Watch the video:
America’s social security system is broken, Parker says. And it’s not just social security. She argues that America’s welfare and safety net programs are all built on a one-size-fits-all model that fails to actually help the poor. Instead, they entrench generational poverty in certain communities, she argues.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Star Parker, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Star Parker:
Thanks, it’s good to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek:
As we’re filming today, there’s about $35 trillion in debt in the U.S. There’s talk about interest rates going up, the population is aging, and there’s a lot of questions about the social safety net that’s been established over time. Is this something we should be concerned about?
Ms. Parker:
We should be concerned about the social safety net. In fact, one of the reasons that I founded CURE [Center for Urban Renewal and Education] was so that we could revisit that time in American history, in particular, black history, to where we got off course. We started off with the founding principles of freedom, personal responsibility, and faith. Then we went down this path for the government to solve all questions about every topic.
We’ve just released a new book, “The State of Black Progress,” to look at what has happened as a society for this particular group of people. Can America work for this particular group of people, those based in a history of slavery and Jim Crow? Then the next step was a welfare state. In the process, economic realities began to change, including the expansion of what we call social safety nets and social security.
In fact, it was in the 1930s when there was an insistence that as a society we must take care of the poor. There is no one that doesn’t want to take care of the poor. That’s why we have nonprofits. That’s why we have charities. That’s why people of America have always been generous in those areas.
But when you try to build out a one-size-fits-all program to solve poverty, then you can run into problems like with social security. In trying to take care of widows and orphans, especially after wartime, you develop a welfare program and social security, and over time it can have unintended consequences.
Mr. Jekielek:
People believe there should be a guaranteed safety net when unexpected things happen, because life can throw you all sorts of difficulties. In a liberal democracy, we generally believe that we should be helping people. Do you believe that too?
Ms. Parker:
I do believe that, but I also believe that we should reevaluate who should be giving that help. I’m one that believes the private sector has all answers for people that have need. However, you’re right. The general society believes that we should have social safety nets. But that’s not what social security is.
We have built this one-size-fits-all program that actually has a disproportionate negative impact on the very poor that we’re trying to help. It is very disproportionate, because what the system is based on is that current workers pay for current retirees. When this system was first developed during the 1930s, it was taken to court. A couple people took it to court and said, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that I can go in your pocket to help somebody else. I'll go in my own pocket and help somebody if I feel that they have a need for that help service.”
But the Supreme Court did rule twice that Social Security was a tax and Congress could change it at any time, and therefore they do. Over time, Social Security is no longer a social safety net. We can also talk about some of these welfare programs and how they’re also not working. But Social Security is not a welfare program—it’s an entitlement program.
It’s an entitlement program that has made a tremendous impact on our society and our economy. It is two-thirds of our budget when you add in Medicare and the expenses we pay in Medi-Cal. As a result, the American people have come to believe that this entitlement is something due them, that it’s not a social safety net, that this is a retirement plan and an obligation of the government to help them in their senior years.
The way that it’s designed, current workers paying for current retirees, cannot work over time. You just mentioned what kind of debt we’re in. We’re in that kind of debt because we keep this Ponzi scheme going. When it was first established, you had 40 workers for every retiree. Today, we have three workers for every retiree. You also have people living longer, and you have all the people forced into this system that they don’t own. They cannot get a decent return, and they can’t transfer it to their heirs.
Mr. Jekielek:
You called it a Ponzi scheme.
Ms. Parker:
I probably shouldn’t have. But if it were a business or a corporation, it would be illegal to do this type of legislation that we now have encouraged our government to do over time. It’s a harsh reality for most people to digest, especially those that are retiring and already have retired. We have 16,000 people turning 65 years old every day who are then under obligation to their government to start getting the benefit that the current workers are paying taxes to pay.
Mr. Jekielek:
You called it a Ponzi scheme because the numbers don’t make sense. Is that what you are saying?
Ms. Parker:
They don’t make sense at all. People ask, “Why do you care? You work in social policy reform. You’re targeted on our 8,700 broken zip codes. You’re trying to help the weakest in our society.” That’s exactly why I care. When current workers are paying for current retirees, a couple of dynamics happen in our society. Number one, we started seeing marriage collapse and childbearing decrease, so the pyramid turned upside down. It is a pyramid.
That’s why I call it a Ponzi scheme. Technically, if it were a private sector business, it would be a scheme. You can’t do pyramids where it is dependent on the group at the bottom. That group down there is smaller today and it’s created a whole lot of social problems for us. But Social Security is one of the biggest ones that most politicians won’t touch.
Mr. Jekielek:
Whether or not this was a good idea at the outset, it worked at some level. You said there was a 40-to-1 ratio at the beginning, but it is 3-to-1 today. That seems like a huge shift. That’s an order of magnitude.
Ms. Parker:
It is an order of magnitude. If you think about sustaining something over time, this never could have worked. When President Roosevelt first developed the program, he asked about the retirement age. He asked about life patterns and life expectancy. Life expectancy at that time was about 65-years-old. The retirement age to start collecting benefits was 63-years-old, because they knew that this would not sustain itself. You can’t collect benefits from people that are now working over a long period of time and think that it’s going to sustain yourself.
Black men get hit the hardest by this particular scenario. Why do black men lose 20 cents on every dollar they put into Social Security? Because it’s only based on two factors. Work patterns and life expectancy. Black men, generally speaking, go into low-wage jobs after high school, work longer on those jobs over time, and then die younger than the general population.
Therefore, every time they pay into Social Security, their 6.2 percent and their employer’s matching 6.2 percent goes into a black hole because they can’t transfer it to their heir. They’ve not really recovered what they put in. A lot of Americans now are starting to feel that. As you get older and you start thinking about benefits, you look at what maybe your 401k gained you and or some other instruments that you may have invested in.
Then you look at what Social Security is telling you that you’re going to receive from the current workers if they continue to pay into this tax system. Many Americans, and younger Americans in particular, are saying, “I’m just not sure this is sustainable. I would have fared better if I had put that same money into a safe mutual fund or an annuity.
Mr. Jekielek:
Obviously, it’s a very significant portion of the budget. How much does that contribute to the budget not being balanced?
Ms. Parker:
This portion is untouchable. That’s why many people don’t take politicians seriously when they say, “We’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to help your life. We’re going to bring down costs of inflation. We’re going to bring down the cost of your food and your gas.” If you add the three entitlement programs and the interest on the debt, you’re talking about three-fourths of the whole budget.
One quarter of the budget is what we’re fighting about. That quarter is split almost equally between defense spending and general welfare, as they call it. Those general welfare programs need to be reevaluated as well. Those types of programs are hurting our economy as well and we look at that in this book.
The reason CURE did this particular piece of work is because the National Urban League, who says that they speak for black interests, has been doing our work every year for the last 40 years. But they keep coming to the same conclusions. They say, “America is systemically racist. We need to keep going into the pockets of wealthy people to give to poor people.”
We wanted to look and see if that’s really true, so we started a few years ago with, “The State of Black America.” But they sent us a cease and desist letter and threatened to sue us. We changed the name to “The State of Black Progress” just to see if America works for African Americans. Not only does it work for African Americans, it’s one of the reasons that we need to now move the discussions to, “How do you now own America?”
You won’t burn down Wall Street if you own Wall Street. You won’t have a disdain for capitalism if you were a capitalist.
One way to do that is to allow for monies that are being forced into the IRS through Social Security to go into private IRAs or other types of instruments. You have the under age 50 population, which includes all Americans; African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, white Americans, and everyone that says, “How do I fare better over time and have a peaceful retirement?” This population is now saying that a one-size-fits-all government program is not the best for us.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve jumped into a solution for what you describe as a very difficult reality—as the budget keeps growing, the deficit keeps growing.
Ms. Parker:
I’m not even sure it will collapse. These social engineers that are working in Washington as congressional leaders have opted themselves out of Social Security. They’re not going to have this dilemma over time—to see if it is sustainable for their lives to go into retirement after living poor or at the hand of the government. But they know these realities.
They know that this is not sustainable.They also know the baby boomers are getting ready to transfer $100 trillion to their youth. They know that over time, $32 trillion sounds like a big number, but most people will not even be concerned about it. They’re thinking day to day about their pocketbooks. Over time, they know that there will always be pockets of money that they can get to to pay off this debt or the interest on the debt.
Remember, they don’t pay on the debt. They pay on the interest of the debt, so it’s just a scheme that keeps going. That’s one of the biggest challenges. That is why I called it a Ponzi scheme, because you can’t stop something this big, or even little things, like education policy, health care policy, and housing policy. These are other areas that we look at in our book to say, “Why are we still doing these monsters from the last century, 100-year-old programs, when you’re hard-pressed to find any business that’s 100 years old in this country? There has been an evolution of ideas and of need, and the government seems to be the only one not doing something about that, even though they do realize that it is true.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please lay out what this solution looks like. You described it earlier. Basically, the money follows the person and it doesn’t go into just a big pot. Is that the idea?
Ms. Parker:
We have situations like this already. We can look at the school choice movement that spent 30 years trying to get the Supreme Court to allow sending children to schools that the parents want. Of course, now you have to battle in the states to get that. But the Supreme Court ruled that it’s not unconstitutional for money to follow children to schools parents want. That has been a constant dilemma for the progressive Left, because unions are involved and they want to keep the one-size-fits-all educational apparatus so that they can keep themselves flush with funds.
It’s the same kind of scenario as money following workers to a place they wanted to retire. But in order to do that, if you’re on the lower end of the economic scale, where do you get that money? Where do you get that money to say, “I’m going to invest in my future?” Now, most Americans have that opportunity because they can perhaps not shop as much, not go out as much, and start saving and investing.
But for the poor earning under $25,000 a year, those that are trapped in our most at-risk communities around the country, that income is just not available. However, there’s a pot over here that they are paying into with 6.2 percent of their own money, and 6.2 percent that the boss has to match, and then they send it to the IRS. They do not send it to a trust fund. People have bought into this idea that there’s some big pot that congressional leaders have been dipping into and stealing from us.
No, there has never been such a trust fund. The Supreme Court ruled twice that it is a tax and it goes into general revenue. We allocate some over here to Social Security. They send out checks to anyone that turns 65 or whenever you decide that you’re going to retire, some at age 62, and some at age 67. Now they’re trying to talk you into waiting longer and getting closer to your death age, because they don’t have any money.
They’re coming up with all kinds of ways to try to convince people that they should postpone retirement. That type of scenario just cannot last over time, especially with fewer children. Did I mention that we have fewer children? Did I mention that in less than 14 years, all the data says that we will have more people over age 65 than under age 18? We will have more people in this country over age 65 than under 18 in just 14 years. That system can’t sustain itself.
Mr. Jekielek:
There is definitely a huge demographic shift with people having less children for all sorts of reasons.
Ms. Parker:
For all sorts of reasons. People have decided to do this in their lives, and we all have the opportunity to make those types of choices. But then it begs the question, “Should we have ourselves in a situation where the government then has us in a one-size-fits-all type of scenario. At CURE, we don’t just argue against what we’re doing on Social Security and wanting private and personal accounts, but we also argue this on welfare programs. All of our welfare programs, our so-called real safety net programs, are built on that same model—one-size-fits-all.
I lived in that system before I got my degree and started my own business and began to work on social policy. I had believed all the lies of the Left, that my life was whatever I wanted it to be, but I ended up on welfare. We can go into all the details of that, but the rules were; don’t work, don’t save, and don’t get married. These rules are one-size-fits-all, and over time they do not work for anyone. That’s why we now have pockets of very broken communities, 8,700 of them, 20 percent of our zip codes, because we have concentrated poverty in those communities. The government owns and controls everything there.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re telling me that the incentive structures are set up to have people not get out of that situation. Please explain that for us.
Ms. Parker:
You want a government house? Don’t get married. You want to live in a housing project? Don’t have a job.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do people really want to live in those places?
Ms. Parker:
Not really. Over time, you can get on this treadmill, if you will. If you’re relatively poor and society says, “We’re going to help you, but we’re not going to help you personally. We’re going to help you through a one-size-fits-all government apparatus, then you go in to apply for that apparatus, and the next thing you know, you have to start decreasing your life. You have to drain your life.
In order to get on Medicaid, you have to make sure that you have no investment in your health plans. In order to get on welfare, you have to make sure that you have no investment in any place, including in income. If you work in a job, they’re going to take what you made on that job and put it back into the coffers. If you’re on a food stamp program, you have certain requirements. They’re called means tests, and every government program has those means tests.
But the means tests are negative and they severely impact the poor. That’s why they’re trapped. Now, it’s generational, because once you get in the system, it’s incredibly difficult to get out. Because every time you try to move yourself upward, you’re penalized by the very system that says they want to help you.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain why the means test is negative.
Ms. Parker:
It says, “Don’t work. Don’t save. Don’t get married.” Those are the means tests. If you have an able-bodied worker in a household, you are not going to qualify for certain benefits. If you work in those poor households, you are not going to qualify for certain benefits. If you have any savings, you are not going to qualify for certain benefits. So you have to drain your life savings.
Now, for people that come in with nothing, you come in with nothing, but you will never have anything. There’s no ownership in a housing project. There’s no ownership in anything and you’re now even dependent on the government for transportation. If you then say, “Maybe I should go to school. Maybe I should go get a job,” you are then penalized. We changed some of those rules during the 1990s under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton, who signed welfare reform into law after 60 years of having it just that way.
But it’s still very difficult to say, “Maybe I should go get a job.” I’ve worked as a consultant on that project, but it’s difficult because a lot of the bluer states don’t like those rules. They don’t want work requirements. They don’t want time limits, so they change the rules a little bit. They make things a little bit more flexible for people to just stay trapped in government.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do they feel like it’s being too hard on the people? What is the thinking?
Ms. Parker:
It’s interesting you would ask that question. In our book, “The State of Black Progress,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown looked at statistics on people having the capacity to self-govern. There is an insistence by the elite that there are certain people that just cannot manage their own lives. They don’t have the capacity. They’re looking through their own lens and saying, “They’re not rocket scientists, therefore they have nothing to contribute.” It’s almost like it’s a demeaning outlook on life for the poor and those amongst us that may have started with less.
It’s a question for all of our society. If we’re going to do anything about these entitlement programs and our social safety net programs that are totally draining and killing our country, the first question is, “Do we think they have the capacity? Can they do something?
Can any child learn to read? Why is it that so many fourth graders that are trapped in these zip codes where nothing works except government, why can’t they read? Why is it that other fourth graders can read?”
It doesn’t matter what ethnic background you’re from, even though these social engineering programs have disproportionately hurt black people. They’ve hurt black people because black people came out of slavery through Jim Crow to a welfare state. This is a very challenging decision that people have to make, “Do I try to get something or do I live off the promises of government?” That would be the first question people have to ask.
Do you believe that people have the ability to self-govern? Do you believe that people have the capacity to do anything, just anything? If we do, then we would be more benevolent when it comes to our own personal interests and our own personal passions than to try to build out one-size-fits-all government programs, or let them just continue to feed off of themselves, which is not only draining the budget, it’s draining the human capacity of those very individuals that we keep saying we want to help.
We should have flexibility and mobility. The only way to do that is to move all of these so-called safety net programs to the states. Let them decide. Let’s build out a community based on location as opposed to a one-size-fits-all from here in Washington where seven out of ten dollars that comes in here goes out immediately to a person through a program.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’re suggesting that you would be able to see the impact.
Ms. Parker:
You would see the impact and you would know if it’s working at all. Look at this monster of HUD [U. S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development]. Most people don’t even know what it does. We have to ask ourselves if it is working. Look what happened in homelessness.
Homelessness was once taken care of by HHS, [U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services]. If you believe that homelessness is a human problem, then that’s where it belongs. But when Barack Obama came to town, he believed it was a housing problem. He moved the budget to HUD and you can see what happened.
We had about 200,000 to 300,000 homeless then, and now we have two million. The budget is unbelievable and it’s destroying entire populations and cities. But keep in mind the Supreme Court did just rule a couple of weeks ago that cities can work on this now. Before, it was that people could camp wherever they wanted to. But we had a good ruling on homelessness from the court where cities can now say, “We’re going to implement our no-loitering laws.” The no-loitering laws are helpful to the individual because if you believe everybody has capacity to do something, then we can believe that we can fix what’s broken down inside of a homeless person.
But that’s private sector work, because they’re not broken for the same reasons. You can’t have a program saying that they all just need a place to live. No, some are really drug addicted, some are alcoholics, some are economically distressed, and others have mental incapacitation. Some are just lost. We have to be able to segment that way. The best place to do that is locally and privately through our charity programs.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us about your background.
Ms. Parker:
I came to a lot of these ideas because of my own personal experiences and bad choices that I was making after believing the lies of the Left all through my childhood, preteen, and teenage years that America was racist, that I shouldn’t mainstream, that my problems were somebody else’s fault, and that I was poor because others were wealthy. When you keep hearing this over and over and over again, you tend to believe it. You just distance yourself from any desire for a better life, any desire for purpose, or any desire for meaning in your life.
I got caught up in everything; reckless living, criminal activity, drug activity, sexual activity, abortion activity, and welfare activity. Then God saved me. I was trying to subsidize my welfare check, and I walked into this business trying to get a little job where they would just pay me under the table so that I didn’t have to tell my caseworker. Because if she found out, then I would get penalized. I wasn’t making anything, I was just working instead of watching TV. Who wants to do that?
I was hoping that they would give me a little money under the table, but they didn’t. Instead, they introduced me to the Lord. That was the best decision I could have made because I was refocusing on myself to be responsible with the choices that I was making, to believe that I really did have the capacity to self-govern, that I did have agency, and that I did have a destiny.
Once you start believing that and investing in that part of everybody’s life, you will start seeing growth. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a homeless person or a former drug person seeing it, the first way that you solve a problem is to admit you have one. That’s something that government can’t do for somebody, and we don’t want them to. The role of government is to protect our interests, not to plunder our interests, and not to pick winners and losers about those interests.
Mr. Jekielek:
You realized that you had agency, and you wanted to cultivate that in yourself. How did you realize that you want to help others do that as well?
Ms. Parker:
That is interesting. I didn’t journey toward that, I just started living a different life. I adopted a habit of reading a proverb a day. I started being more focused on bringing up my daughter in a more responsible way. I started a business after I graduated from college. After that business was destroyed in the 1992 Los Angeles riots I really knew I needed to do something. Because the excuses that we were hearing after the Rodney King riots were the same excuses that I heard when I was a young teenager.
I thought, “We all know that these things are not true. We know that the country is not stacked against us because we’re black. We know that every young black man is not going to be pulled over by the police.” I just felt I needed to address the lies.
Because if we keep trying to paint this picture that all blacks are poor and it’s somebody else’s fault, then you’re going to have all blacks feel that they’re victims, even when they’re very wealthy. You’re always going to have this narrative of the social justice warriors that we have the oppressors and the oppressed. It makes excuses for people to live lawlessly and recklessly and then it builds up big government.
I started speaking out, and in speaking out, I got national attention. At the time, the GOP Congress was considering welfare reform. Because of my background in welfare and my degree in marketing, it was a natural fit to begin to consult with them and to be one of the leading spokespersons in the society for why we needed to make these changes.
We had cancer in our society, it had metastasized, and it wasn’t going to go well for anyone. Having very large, chronically poor portions of our population is not good for poor people, but it’s also not good for our whole society. As I started speaking out on this, we were able to do welfare reform. In fact, I checked the box, which was number eight on the Contract with America. I spoke at the convention that year for the Republicans, and I checked that box.
After that occurred, everybody went home. I thought, “Now, we just changed the reality of five million women and nine million children. They’re not going to know what to do.
Especially after I did the Oprah Winfrey show when she said, “They’re going to kick kids out of their homes and have them starving to death.” I was like, “No, they’re not.”
I felt I needed to say something or do something, so I began to organize some of the pastors that I knew in Los Angeles at the time. Maybe we should share some ideas about what we should do next. I thought 40 pastors would come and 400 showed up. That’s when I knew. It’s not that they didn’t care. It’s just that they just didn’t know what to do.
That launched me into this new work. Over time, I organized it into a nonprofit. About 12 years ago, I moved it here full-time to Washington, D.C., because we want these barriers removed. This is a people that just don’t have the ability to break free. The Left stands in the way of ideas for them to get free, whether it’s housing policy or education policy. We have two good essays around that.
Why are we trapping people in one size fits all and then expanding it into Obamacare and then nothing works for those that are the least of these, that are most impoverished? There are things that we as a society need to do to remove these barriers. But we have to first believe that these folks can self-govern. Do we believe that when we see one break free, that it’s an exception to the law, or do we believe that others can break free as well? I believe that all of us can break free.
I believe that even though we might not live at the same station, we can all do something. I want that for those that are most entrapped in these communities. One of our writers, Howard Husock from the American Enterprise Institute, wrote about the poor side of town and why we need it in one of the books that he just released. He looks at housing policy and how even though you had poor communities, there was an interest in the elite that this was just not acceptable. It might not have been acceptable for them because they weren’t forced to live there.
But was it acceptable to the person who owned that little bit of piece of property, even if it was only 800 square feet, where they sat out in the front yard and they knew all their neighbors? They didn’t seem to mind. But here comes the government saying, “No, we don’t like that. Tear it down, build housing projects where you don’t know your neighbor.” We’re revisiting some of these ideas.
Mr. Jekielek:
Why did housing projects fail? This is a big question in general.
Ms. Parker:
No, it’s a little question. One social scientist calls it the tragedy of the commons. No one owns it, so no one takes care of it. This is very simple. If the government owns it, why would I pick up the trash? Like Phil Graham used to say, and Larry Summers used to say it when we were doing welfare reform, “I’ve never seen a man wash a rented car.” You don’t wash a rented car, but you wash your car.
When you have the little bitty house, with your little bitty rocking chair, with your little bitty neighbors, it was clean. We concentrated poverty. The unproductive and the promiscuous show up every 1st and 15th when the welfare check comes in, and now we have two new children. This is not rocket science.
In fact, one of the beautiful things about the Trump administration last time he was in town is he came with a vision to fix the inner cities. He didn’t know what to do about it, so he called in people like myself and many others who’ve been thinking about and working on these ideas for quite some time, to come up with some ideas together and what steps to take.
One of those ideas took the form of opportunity zones in the tax bill under the leadership of Senator Tim Scott.
What did this do? It allowed for capital to go into these communities that are broken without a gain tax on it. If you have a capital gains tax, money is fungible. It’s going to go where it can make more of itself. It opened that door for us to have these creative discussions. We’ve seen models of what happens when you bust up big cities into smaller communities where people can manage them.
In fact, I really like the idea that Paul Romer has for charter cities, and we’re adopting that. We’re looking into it at my organization right now. Maybe we can take these areas and just remove government barriers the same way we do charter schools so that people will have a seat at the table to heal their own community. When you try to revitalize a community, the Left has branded it gentrification. If you look up regentrification, you'll see that now the dictionary definition is white people taking black people’s property.
We know that that’s not what it means, so we call it revitalizing. One really great example is Greenville, South Carolina. They even have a new book called Reimagining Greenville, where they tell the story of an immigrant who was leaving the Holocaust and how he came to be their mayor. At that point, he said that they were selling more sex than shirts on their main street, because they were so racially divided. They moved the bridge, and next thing you know, the water is flowing and they have a river.
Now, they have a suspension bridge. Now you see BMW’s there. Now on the main street, you can walk down two blocks and hear 20 different languages, because there’s a magnet around the world saying, “Let’s come and eat in Greenville, South Carolina.” Can we change these realities?
Of course we can. But you have to have energy to change them. Because there are some people that don’t want it changed.
Mr. Jekielek:
Please tell us more about what happened in Greenville. You use this term, Charter City. Did Greenville become a Charter City?
Ms. Parker:
No, they did not, and I want to be clear there. Charter City was an idea from an economist, Paul Romer, who I’ve never met. But I did call him and said, “I just want to ask you a question. Can this work in our country?” Because it was an idea for other countries. As Barry Asmus argues in his book, “The Poverty of Nations,” you have to have certain components for a society to really work.
A free society has to be free. You need a rule of law and a constitution. You need capitalism as your mode of money. Then you also need traditional values. Our country was built in the Judeo-Christian heritage, so you have that value system that the majority of your citizens would appreciate. At CURE we call them the three Cs, the principles of Christianity, the virtues of capitalism, and the rule of law in our Constitution, then you can start developing the capacity of your people.
If we have an opportunity again to go deeper into these 8,700 broken zip codes, we already have an Opportunity Zone initiative. The challenge with the Opportunity Zone initiative in those communities is other factors are involved as well. You have to have a comprehensive plan. That’s why it has to be a charter city. You have to also fix the broken parts. You have to also fix the schools. You have to also fix charity schools and housing policies, plus there are other policies. It’s not just about the money.
What they did in Greenville was on their own. This has been going on since the 30s and 40s. They just were a dying city. It’s a smaller city, and it works better than a big major city. But it can happen in major cities if they just reduce their size in some cases. How do you have a system like in L.A. where you have 800,000 kids in the same school district? That’s not working for anyone, and we all know it.
In Greenville, they just started changing things. They decided that it’s more important for them to not be so hostile racially to build their own community. Once they made that decision, they hired an urban planner. I’m under the understanding, and maybe we'll hear from that person who was the urban planner, has never even been to Greenville, doesn’t even know how much he has revitalized it.
But he did tell them the four things you need to revitalize a community. First of all, you need wide sidewalks, because criminals don’t like wide sidewalks and good people don’t like narrow ones. You need trees because trees give energy. You need benches for husbands to sit on while the wife is shopping. Because they had built this fast lane through their main street so that they wouldn’t have to communicate and talk to each other, now they had to revitalize their community, meaning a shorter street with impatient people who now have stoplights every block.
They built out a little mice game. They not only put art on every corner, like big statue art, but they also have a little mice game for kids to go find the mice, after they hide their little bronze mice. They’re all up and down the main street. It’s a long story, but it’s in this book called Reimagining Greenville. Can that be done in other cities? Of course it can. There’s nothing that unique about them except that they decided to do it and it worked very successfully.
Mr. Jekielek:
It sounds like they really considered the human element and how to make the city livable.
Ms. Parker:
They were forced to do it, but they’re still having a debate on their property taxes. You need to flatten your tax similar to what was done in California to not allow people to be displaced when growth happens. That’s in the property tax area. That’s getting into the weeds of the policy, but the point is that there are places in society where we can fix what is broken.
It just takes thought, time, and energy. We compiled this book, “The State of Black Progress,” to set the record straight about some of the miscommunications about racial progress in our country and look at court law. Dr. Bill Allen looks at where we got off track after the Reconstruction, and it’s fascinating because he talks a little bit about DEI and all these other areas that people are now concerned about. He’s asking the question, “Do we want cultural pluralism or do we want cultural marginalization? That’s what we have now, this cultural marginalization. You’re something else before you’re American. It’s really starting to hurt us that now people are not, “e pluribus unum.”
Multiculturalism is no longer about bringing in ideas and information about your particular culture and sharing it, even though we’re all Americans. Now, we’ve divided ourselves up in this whole DEI system, and then we are teaching it through critical race theory. We couldn’t address all of those things, and that’s why we'll do another one next year. But we do look at those areas just to give people more food for thought. If we can come to an agreement that we can fix things , then how do we fix them? Those are some of the things we share as well.
Mr. Jekielek:
What would you say is the most surprising finding from this year’s study, “The State of Black Progress?”
Ms. Parker:
We also do a couple of other annual studies. One is the impact of abortion on the black community. Having 20 million dead after Roe v. Wade is just unacceptable, so we really dive into that. But we also do one on black voting patterns and behaviors. What was most surprising was not just that a majority of blacks think the country is unfair, when I asked about fairness and about the haves and have-nots, the black community still says they’re have-nots, even though 75 percent don’t live in poverty.
In fact, in 2019, we had more blacks making over $75,000 a year than under $25,000 a year. When asked if they will be a have-not in the future, the majority still say yes. Whereas Latinos, they came in polling that they are the have nots, but in the future they believe that they will be the haves. Then, of course, the white community, a couple of generations in front of these other two populations, already believe that they are the haves.
What startled me most is how many whites believe the country is unfair to blacks. It was a larger number than I thought, which means that we have a lot of work to do in changing the narrative of what has really happened in black America. I’m going to be looking deeper into that, in particular, as we go into developing our next year’s edition.
All the evidence is clear that the country works for blacks. Everyone has neighbors, they have worker families, everyone has seen cross-racial families, or they have been working for an African-American boss. All these things have happened in our society. There’s something still in our attitude that still thinks, “Yeah, but.” Much of that is from what the media constantly pushes out about certain people and populations.
If it’s not countered, nature abhors a vacuum, so people will have a tendency to believe it. If there are so many of these whites that believe that black life is unfair, then that keeps these government programs going. We are in this cycle of continuous damage, because of these very programs that some people think are helping are actually hurting.
Mr. Jekielek:
The reforms that you describe here are very comprehensive. You had two chapters on education. I had Ian Rowe on the show from Vertex Academies and he has a chapter on the Rosendale schools. That’s a very interesting study of unintended consequences.
Ms. Parker:
It is a major unintended consequence of Brown v. Board of Education. When we came out of the civil rights era, a whole lot of misunderstanding went on. Dr. King’s movement wasn’t about forced integration. His movement was about desegregation. Then you leave desegregation and start forcing integration. Now, you have all of these affirmative action programs, the DEI programs, and all these reduce-the-merit movements. The unintended consequences are what Ian points out.
What about all the black schools that were working? What about all the black businesses and communities that were working? Next thing you know, you’re competing with a concept of forced integration that sucks the money, the energy, and the most talented into different areas of interest. Yes, he did an excellent job on that. He pointed out those Rosendale schools as an example of what happened after Brown v. Board of Education.
Did we want segregation? Of course not, and no one is arguing that. We are already in situations where the Left will come after you and say, “Look, you’re arguing that Jim Crow was a good idea.” No, we’re not. We’re arguing what Dr. King argued, which is to remove governmental barriers. Jim Crow were governmental barriers and they were segregation. But that doesn’t mean to now force people to do things that they need to develop over time with their own agency.
Mr. Jekielek:
Is there one of these reforms that you think could be implemented quickly or are they all going to be big projects?
Ms. Parker:
They are all big because the government is big. It’s just too big. Thank God for the Chevron decision from the court as well, so that we can start reassessing the nanny state and the administrative state. Is it a good idea for them to be able to make these rules without voter participation that has just grown a monster that no one knows what they do, or should they even be doing it? It’s all going to take time.
There’s one area where we should really have discussion, and it’s abortion. It’s a crime against humanity, so we shouldn’t be doing it, and we will end it. But the other issue would be social security reform. We have a window of opportunity. The progressive Left is arguing that they want equity. Equity is an economic term. If you really want equity, then how do you do that?
How does a good man leave an inheritance for his grandchildren, that the Proverbs talks about? How does the, how does, the wealth of the wicked end up in the hand of the just? When you buy stock, you own. When you own a company, they actually take calls from their stockholders. There’s nothing like telling them you are a stockholder. I remember when Delta Airlines was trying to get off involved in some of the social justice stuff after the state of Georgia made some changes in their voting law.
I’m a syndicated columnist and I had to write a column on it. But I didn’t write a column on it saying that I’m going to boycott you. No, I wrote a column saying, “I am a Delta Diamond Million Miler, and I think that you should know that. Perhaps you should be concerned about getting your customers where they want to go in a decent environment, as opposed to getting involved in a social justice movement that has implications that I don’t think that you want to have to deal with.”
Look what they’re doing to states like Florida. When progressives don’t get their way, they destroy. That’s not a good, healthy society, because then it leads to other tensions. One of the Proverbs tells us that when you don’t put a fire on the log, the flame will go out. But if we keep this going, then you end up with J6, and then people talk about having a civil war. Why would we want to do that to ourselves? Been there, done that. We should battle in the voting booth.
But in order to tone it down, you have to have a stake in the country. One way you have a stake in the country is to own it. People that have mutual funds want America to work. People that have stock want that company to work. But there’s only one group of people in our country that do not have those opportunities, and that is our poor.
The low-wage worker just doesn’t have enough to say, “Let me put some money in a savings account and then build it to where now I can go out and buy a little stock and or a little IRA.” That money goes to Social Security. Their money is in there. It’s being matched by their boss and taken out of their check before they even see the check.
Many companies will match a 401(k) investment plan. If the working poor were able to put that 6.2 percent into a 401(k) plan and their boss matched it, all of us would fare a lot better over the next 20 to 25 years. But you don’t have anyone really willing to talk about it. Nikki Haley was talking about it, but she didn’t make it through the primary to become the candidate. She’s over at the Hudson Institute now, so she may continue that kind of work.
But it is work that we have to consider, and especially for anyone that’s under age 50. They need to consider if this is a good idea for the next 15, 20, 30, or 40 years to depend on a system that is collapsing.
We are already $35 trillion in debt and we just can’t keep going on like this.
Even though there will be other transfers of wealth in the private sector, this Social Security system has a very disproportionate impact on poor people, not just on their economic future and well-being, but also on their attitude toward life when it comes to mainstreaming. We have enough people that don’t like this country, and they don’t want to mainstream into this country. In that population, you can build interest for a healthy America in the long term.
Mr. Jekielek:
Star, any final thoughts as we finish up?
Ms. Parker:
It’s a really thick book, so I’m hoping everybody will go out and get it, because it’s important, especially people looking in from outside of a community. The discussion has always come from the Left saying that we should think about the journey of African Americans. When you hear that there is another position, it will help build more continuity in our society, because then people will look at their neighbor very differently or look at our inner cities very differently. They will think, “Maybe we can fix this.” That’s what I want, a better attitude about helping people help themselves.
Mr. Jekielek:
Star Parker, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Parker:
Thank you. I really appreciate being here with you.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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