Treasuring equity, Biden edition #987,456

The Biden Administration yesterday announced a new Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity. As expected, it is filled with the woke pretending to be the wise.

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The Biden administration is deepening its effort to focus on reducing racial inequity with the formation of a new advisory committee that will help the Treasury Department carry out policies that aim to narrow economic disparities faced by communities of color.

The Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity will include 25 members from academia, business and advocacy groups. It will convene four times a year to evaluate and offer guidance to the Treasury Department and its leadership on an array of programs that touch nearly every corner of the economy.

Biden administration officials say the focus on equity will help unlock economic potential that has for decades gone untapped.

The Chairman Michael Nutter is a former Mayor of Philadelphia who has turned into a lobbyist. He seems connected enough, having worked on Michael Bloomberg’s campaign. A pretty standard, very liberal Democrat politician.

But the Vice Chair is a peach.

In the latest iteration of the Biden administration’s inclusion of capitalism critics in federal governance, Felicia Wong, the president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, was announced to serve as the nascent racial equity committee’s vice chair.

Wong is a former executive at the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal megadonors founded in part by billionaire George Soros. Since 2012, she has led the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank that wants to abolish for-profit prisons, reimagine capitalism, and put racial justice at the “center” of all government policymaking.

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Wong, it turns out, is the one who should have been named Nutter. She is a full on Social Justice Warrior who admires Black Lives Matter, supports defunding the police, and replacing capitalism with a race-based socialism that would entirely remake American society and economy. She is just the sort of person who would find a nice sinecure at a Leftist non-profit where should could make big bucks while lecturing the plebs about how awful we all are. As president of the organization she pulled in over $300,000 in compensation. I have no idea if she got speaking fees or other income from her tenure there.

Needless to say, it is a good gig.

At the end of last year the Roosevelt Institute published an outline for Wong’s vision of the new racial socialist economy, and it is striking. The basic thrust of it is that the push for racial equality has been wrongheaded, in that it focused on equal rights and opportunity for all. The new paradigm has to focus on equal outcomes, regardless of what this does to the rights of individuals.

Because our racial disparities are so severe across all elements of the American economy and society, no policy, even if facially race-neutral, is race-neutral in practice. The design of all policy proposals—big and small—must be attentive to racial outcomes. All policy, from vaccine distribution to higher education funding to tax reform, will have racialized effects. Recognizing this reality, and always considering race in policy design, is therefore vital.

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Just the sort of thing you want an advisor to the Treasury Department to advocate.

Think about this for a moment or two. The United States Treasury Department is taking advice from somebody who rejects capitalism and explicitly promotes a race-based socialist economy and government policies explicitly designed to replace individual rights with racial group rights.

Wong’s agenda goes far beyond executive branch initiatives. She firmly believes that our legislative process is designed to enforce oppression and needs to be radically restructured.

“In this environment, a focus on democracy and racial justice means that filibuster reform or elimination must be on the table. The filibuster has been disproportionately used throughout history by segregationists and other white supremacists to slow or stop laws intended to promote racial equity. Today, it continues to stall progress on key democracy priorities: protecting voting rights; ending partisan gerrymandering; curbing the influence of corporate money and lobbying in our rulemaking process; and creating stronger ethics laws for federal officeholders.”

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I think we can all agree that the racial history in the United States is hardly unblemished. That is hardly controversial. But the solution to the inequities cannot be reinstitution racial discrimination. That is both unjust, and when it has been tried it doesn’t work.

The best thing Americans can do to promote racial equality is something very simple and achievable: eliminate the public school monopoly. Racial disparities in educational outcomes are a stain on the nation, and it is the Left that is utterly committed to keeping racial minorities trapped in a system that fails them.

 

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Jazz Shaw 7:20 PM | March 18, 2024
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