NAACP dinner: Pelosi for The Minority Youth Unemployment Act

Posted by hpayne on April 29, 2013

AP photo

“We did not invite Nancy Pelosi here tonight because she is a Democrat,” said Detroit NAACP President Wendell Anthony at this weekend’s 58th annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner in Detroit. “We invited her here tonight because she has been a champion of the issues that are important to all of us.”

Pelosi then stepped to the podium to advocate an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour, a policy so destructive to young black employment that the Wall Street Journal dubbed it “The Minority Youth Unemployment Act.”

With friends like Pelosi, who needs enemies?

The last minimum wage hike – a 2007 Pelosi initiative that raised the federal mandate to $7.25 an hour – has led to the highest teen unemployment levels since records were first kept in 1948. Black teens in cities like Detroit have seen the worst of it, with their unemployment rate rising to 42 percent from 29 percent in 2007.

Pelosi justified the wage hike by claiming CEO salaries now average 350 times the wage of the average worker. So why not hike the wage 350 times?

Pelosi also told the NAACP that all children must have access to good schools. “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education,” she said.

Yet the Democratic Party and its union allies have stood in the school house door blocking Detroit charter school choice for inner city black families – denying the less privileged the same choice that wealthy black leaders like Rep. John Conyers, D-Detroit, have enjoyed (Conyers sent his children to Cranbrook private school).

So invite Nancy Pelosi to speak – then do the opposite of what she champions.

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