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Star Parker lived the welfare life as a black single woman for seven years.
Then, after four abortions, she reached a turning point. Pregnant by one man, living with another guy, she decided she was done with abortions. She applied for a job but was told she would not be hired because of her lifestyle (this was a few decades ago, she’s now 61 and a grandmother).
The courage of those employers, who told her the lifestyle was not acceptable to God, launched her on a new course. She discovered Jesus and committed her life to him and got a job and then launched her business.
The Watts riots of 1992 wiped out her business and moved her into political advocacy as a talk show host (great backstory on that one) as well as prominence nationally. She served as a key consultant in the welfare reform worked out between the Congress led by Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton in 1996.
That led her to form her think tank, the Center for Urban Renewal and Reform. It’s based in Washington, D.C., a couple of blocks from the White House.
In two talks in the Danville area last week, she laid out both the issues and the opportunities in the “distressed zip codes” where poverty reigns. She attributes that to the collapse of ethics and marriage—the result of the Left’s attack in the 1970s. The result is that babies are three times more likely to be born out of wedlock; there’s no intact family with moms and dads thus a lack of tradition; there’s lack of education that leads to a lack of work ethic; that leads to a lack of vision.
The Bible says without vision people will perish.
Star says that’s what is happening in black communities that have become “Uncle Sam’s poverty plantations.”
She describes herself as a living witness to the inconsistency of the war on poverty with God’s scripture. She also points out that the government is so “efficient” that about 20 cents on the dollar of the $900 billion spent annually actually benefits the people it’s targeted for.
Star, like other conservative commentators such as Jason Riley of Wall Street Journal and Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute at Stanford) understand and speak out about the abject failure of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the Great Society coupled with The Left’s war on marriage and faith that launched in the 1970s.
Marriage has collapsed. In the 1970s, 75 percent of people were married, today it’s 45 percent. For Blacks, it’s worse—a drop from 70 percent to 30 percent.
Abortion kills 685,000 black babies a year in this time in history—a total of about 68 million since the Supreme Court decisions of Roe vs. Wade.
$24 trillion has been spent in the war on poverty since Johnson and Congress launched this lunacy and the percentage of people living in poverty remains mired between 22-25 percent.
Her solution is to get the federal government out of many areas of life it never belonged, such as welfare, housing and education. She strongly advocates parental choice in education so poor kids can escape from failing schools. Sadly, 39 states block school choice. Parker would replace federal programs with block grants to the states arguing that the Washington D.C. one-size fits all approach is broken from the beginning.
Remember, Obamacare’s insurance guidelines mandate that birth control and pregnancy coverage for all women regardless of their age.
When asked what she would say if she had five minutes with President Trump, she said she would encourage him to personalize Social Security, so it was owned by the individual like a retirement account. She pointed out that blacks’ net worth is on average 10 percent of that of whites and 19 percent of black families have no net worth.
Personalizing it creates immediate equity and, over time, will create wealth.
“It’s about freedom and ownership,” she said. “We need to build a new model to make the existing model obsolete.”
In addition to policy lobbying in Washington D.C., Urban Cure also has an outreach to pastors working in the distressed zip codes.
http://www.urbancore.org