Ron Walters, Final Call
- President-elect Barack Obama has been formulating plans for the Stimulus Package that will be enacted shortly after he takes office.
Many people have asked “What’s next?” now that we have a Black president and many of the answers have been abstract. However, coming down the pike is the largest amount of social and economic funding to be invested in moving the economy and the country forward we have seen in a long time. It is reputed to be in the area of $800 billion to $1.2 trillion and he originally proposed to create 2.5 million jobs.
More recently, however, he has adjusted his goal to 3-3.5 million jobs because of analyses that show the probability that the economy will lose 3.5 million jobs in all of 2009.
Yet this goal should be juxtaposed against the size of the growing Black unemployment rate, estimated to be 12 percent at present, which would be viewed as a crisis if it were a national figure.
It has always mystified me why government officials and economists consider this as ‘normal’ with respect to Blacks. The truth is that it has always been a crisis, but neither Democratic nor Republican officials have cared enough t
