Three Things We Are Being Told That Are Simply Wrong

On Friday, Heritage Action posted an article titled, “Three False Charges Against America’s Police Officers.”

This is the article:

Many of the events following George Floyd’s death have only perpetuated injustice and led to violence and crime. Thousands of rioters across the country have destroyed private property, looted businesses, attacked police officers, and have even taken the lives of innocent Americans.

Amidst the lawlessness, some on the left are using George Floyd’s death as an opportunity to push for extreme leftist agendas. Many of these agendas distort the truth about the role and efficacy of our nation’s police departments and propose radical “reform” measures that could potentially contribute to more crime and chaos in our country. These radical proposals from the left are based on lies and must be countered with truth.

Here are some of the fictitious claims liberals make against police officers… and the facts to counter them.

FICTION: “American police departments are systemically racist.”

FACT: Allegations of systemic racism are false and harmful.

While it is important to address grievances caused by the nation’s police departments, broad, all-encompassing accusations of racism completely disregard years of intentional training, diversification, and reform in police departments. Police are deployed based upon the location of crime, calls for service, and other data much of which is centered in minority communities. Additionally, research suggests that officers take longer to discharge their weapon when confronting African American suspects compared to confrontations with white or Hispanic suspects. Accusing the country’s police departments of inherent prejudice only feeds the extreme liberal narrative that police departments should be disbanded altogether.

Additional Resources

Policing in America: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future

Confronting Police Abuse Requires Shifting Power From Police Unions

Reform of Policing: What Makes Sense—and What Doesn’t

FICTION: “Police officers increase the likelihood of violence and crime against Americans.”

FACT: Simply put: the more policing there is, the safer America is.

Take the example of New York City which had its peak homicide rate in 1990 after several decades of pursuing a policing system which pushed officers into the background and relegated them to simply responding to crimes. In 1990, New York City had 2,245 murders. After switching to community-based policing with the goal of preventing crime, New York City has seen a dramatic decrease in both shootings and murders (down to 292 in 2017), resulting in a safer city. This is in large part due to officer training, increased police diversification, and improved policing methods. The fact is that American communities are overwhelmingly safer with police than without police.

Additional Resource

Cops Count, Police Matter: Preventing Crime and Disorder in the 21st Century

FICTION: “To stop police violence we need to defund the police.”

FACT: This argument is simply irrational. America needs police officers to maintain law and order.

Defunding our nation’s police departments would only lead to more crime and chaos and would directly harm the communities who disproportionately suffer the most. Additionally, defunding police departments will only lead to tighter budget constraints and less well-equipped police officers, making it even harder for police officers to do an already difficult and stressful job. However, in instances in which police officers use force outside the bounds of their training or even unlawfully, often union contracts stand in the way of appropriate discipline. Therefore, to stop unlawful police violence it is important that we reform the police union contract system.

The Impact Of The Policies Of President Trump

Yesterday Breitbart reported that Latino business owners are enjoying a 46 percent jump in revenue this year.

The article reports:

In May, Alfredo Ortiz of the Job Creators Network said that although Democrats claimed the Trump economy was no help to the Hispanic community, the facts revealed the opposite.

Ortiz wrote:

The fact is that Hispanics are flourishing in the Trump economy. Democrats asserting the contrary is a mere partisan talking point to try to deny Trump the Hispanic support he has earned and which may decide the presidential election outcome next year. Expect Democrats to increase their identity politics attacks in an effort to skew Latinos against Republicans over the next year and a half.

In September of 2018, Arora called the rapidly expanding Latino community a “powerful force” and stated that their businesses “contribute more than $700 billion to the economy annually.”

“The achievements of Latino small businesses are impressive when you consider it is often hard for them to gain access to capital. Yet they are making progress,” Arora concluded.

The Democrats will say anything to convince people that the Trump economy is not working for average Americans and minorities, but thinking Americans can look at the statistics and realize that the numbers show that average Americans and minorities are the people who have benefited from President Trump’s economic policies. If these groups want their prosperity to continue, they need to vote to continue those policies. I can guarantee that no Democrat running for President will continue those policies.

What The Democrats Are Really Afraid Of

You can dismiss the turnout at Trump rallies versus the turnout for Democrat candidates. You can dismiss the tweets you may not like, but you can’t dismiss what is happening to the President’s approval numbers in minority communities.

The American Spectator posted an article today with the following headline, “Why Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Up Among Minorities.”

The article notes:

A mounting number of voter polls show that, despite shrill denunciations of the President by the Democrats for his alleged racism, Trump is enjoying a dramatic increase in his approval ratings among minorities. This isn’t, as some liberal news outlets and pundits have suggested, wishful thinking based on outlier polls. The trend began showing up in surveys early this year and appears to be gaining momentum. Some polls now show his approval numbers at 25 percent among African-American voters and 50 percent among Hispanic voters. If those figures hold for the next 15 months, they will render Trump unbeatable in November of 2020.

The article notes a number of reasons for the rising approval ratings. Among the Hispanic community, two reasons are the President’s stand on immigration and the economy. Those in the Hispanic community who followed the rules to become Americans do not support endless illegal immigration. Those in the Hispanic community have also seen a dramatic increase in employment opportunities and a decrease in unemployment. In the black community, people are asking why cities that have been controlled by Democrats for decades and given massive amounts of money by the government still look worse than cities in other countries that were totally destroyed during World War II. In other words, after voting Democrat for decades with no visible improvement in their situation, minorities are seeing positive change. Minorities have the lowest unemployment numbers in history. They are seeing employment opportunities they have not seen before. Pocketbook issues are having an impact on the way they view President Trump.

The article concludes:

The main reason for the surge in Trump’s Hispanic support, however, is the economy. As Steve Cortes, a member of the President’s Hispanic Advisory Council, points out:

Hispanics neither desire nor expect a laundry list of deliverables from government, but rather seek the conditions to advance and prosper independently.  As the most statistically entrepreneurial demographic in America, Hispanics have thrived amid the Trump boom as regulatory and tax relief unleashes a small business surge. Every American benefits from this new dynamism, but Hispanics most of all.

Hispanic voters, mind you, will be the largest ethnic minority in the electorate by 2020. They, combined with African Americans, may very well decide who will live in the White House after the next election. Moreover, the days when Democrats could win all of their votes by screeching “racism,” encouraging illegal immigration, and offering massive giveaway programs are probably over. President Trump appears to be building real support among minorities by providing genuine opportunity in a thriving economy. If he receives their support in anywhere near the percentages suggested above, he will win in 2020 no matter who runs against him.

The presidential election of 2020 will be very interesting.

If It’s Not About The Money, What Is It About?

In January of 2018, The Washington Times noted that the estimated $18 billion over the next decade spent on a border wall between the United States and Mexico would be roughly 0.0338 percent of the $53.128 trillion the Congressional Budget Office currently estimates the federal government will spend over that same 10-year period. So what is all the fuss about?

Yesterday WWF came to the Oval Office in the White House when Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer discussed the border wall with President Trump. YouTube posted the video:

The battle is not about money–it’s about votes. The Democrats have lost some of the voting blocs they have counted on to win elections–they can no longer be sure of the working man’s vote or the union vote. So how are they going to win elections? They are counting on the minority vote. The Democrats are afraid that if the wall is built, they will lose the Hispanic vote.

According to the Pew Research Center, this is how Hispanics voted in 2018:

According to a USA Today article posted November 9, 2016, President Trump did surprisingly well among Hispanic voters:

Hispanics favored Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton 65% to 29%, a 36-point difference that helped her secure winning margins in states like Nevada and Colorado and kept her competitive late into the night in other key battleground states.

But that margin, based on exit polling conducted by Edison Research, was smaller than the 71%-27% split that President Obama won in 2012. And it was smaller than the 72%-21% her husband, former president Bill Clinton, won in 1996.

Because the Democrats are becoming more dependent on the votes of minority groups to win elections, it is easy to understand why they would oppose any legislation or spending that most cost them votes in the minority community.

Refusing To Learn The Lessons Of History

On Thursday, Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner posted an article about a government move to again encourage subprime lending in the mortgage market.

The article reports:

I have written frequently that I estimate that one-third of the mortgage foreclosures in the 2007-10 period were of Hispanic homebuyers. Very many had been granted mortgages, despite bad or dubious credit, by lenders who then fobbed them off on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or other mortgage securitizers, in the meantime gaining brownie points with regulators for lending to “minorities.” Evidence supporting this comes, inadvertently, from an Urban Institute report spotlighted by the industrious and provocative blogger Steve Sailer. You can see that there was a huge increase in the number of mortgages granted to Hispanics in the years running up to 2006, when housing prices peaked, centered in metro Los Angeles and the adjacent Inland Empire to the east, in California’s Central Valley and in metro Las Vegas and Phoenix. Not coincidentally, these “sand states” (plus Florida) accounted for more than half of mortgage foreclosures when housing prices plummeted and buyers who suddenly found themselves underwater and/or out of work defaulted on their mortgages.

Both President Bush and President Clinton encouraged home buying for Hispanic buyers, which resulted in many of the previous income/mortgage ratio standards for granting mortgages being ignored. This resulted in the housing bubble, the crash that followed, and a tremendous amount of money spent in attempting to avoid disaster.

Well, the government has not learned its lesson. The article reports:

Now the Urban Institute and the Obama administration are pushing for more mortgages for blacks and Hispanics with subpar credit ratings. Haven’t America, the world and the intended beneficiaries already suffered enough from this perhaps well-intentioned but indubitably misguided policy?

How many times do we have to do this before we learn that it is not a good idea to lend large sums of money to people who cannot pay it back?