President Bush used part of the time he spent with the NAACP suggesting the group help in his efforts to repeal the estate tax.
How wrong he got it.
There's a sense of pandering in his tactic of identifying a prominent black, Robert L. Johnson, who is wealthy and who supports repealing the estate tax, and then pretending that the group of intelligent, educated blacks in the room before him doesn't know about the budget choices repealing the estate tax would entail.
It is disturbing, to say the least.
The reality is, of all the things that are unequal between the races, wealth is the most unequal. A National Bureau of Economics working paper, for example, decomposes whether the black-white gap in wealth holdings is explicable based on the black-white income gap.
It's not.
There is no easy way to model the wealth gap between blacks and whites based on income -- because there is virtually no overlap in the wealth distribution.
The bottom 10 percent of white wealth holders overlaps with the bottom 10 percent of blacks but that's the extent of it. After that, the bottom quarter of white wealth is equal to the top quarter for blacks. Once you've reached the median for whites, you've surpassed virtually all blacks.
As economists at the Center for American Progress have noted, an estimated 59 of the 38 million blacks in the country will be affected by the estate tax in 2006. Fifty-nine individuals don't even constitute a fraction of a percentage point among the nearly 300 million people who live in this country. If estate tax repeal would benefit Johnson, it's not going to help 99.99 percent of his fellow blacks.
For the president to tout repealing the estate tax to a black audience as a policy that's going to help blacks gain more economic power is condescending. It suggests that blacks are not aware of issues of wealth disparity and the budget tradeoffs that estate tax repeal would require.
A new estate tax compromise proposal by GOP Rep. Bill Thomas would still gut between 75 percent and 80 percent of the revenue generated by the tax. America would be $350 billion worse off than if we let the current law stand. The president is assuming that blacks are ignorant of what could be done with $350 billion.
This is the true disconnect between blacks and the president's party.
Medicaid, a crucial service where cutbacks have disproportionately affected blacks, could be substantially funded by estate tax revenues. We could fully fund the No Child Left Behind program, which does not have enough money allocated to it to enable it to do its work.
Too often blacks are assumed by politicians or portrayed in the press as not knowing the issues. Democrats and white liberals, it is often said, take blacks for granted. But this approach is no better. It's too easy to mention Robert Johnson and then not have to mention the facts of wealth inequality or the budgetary impacts of estate tax repeal.
It is a disturbing disconnect that the president would talk about the difficulty his party has in reaching blacks -- and then give an economic example that benefits no blacks, at the cost of great benefit to programs that serve blacks well.
Bush's talk to the NAACP took the easy way out, and assumes his work is done. No wonder he received what might best be described as a modest reception.
William Spriggs is professor and chairman of the Economics Department at Howard University in Washington. He is a former executive director of the National Urban League's Institute for Opportunity and Equality and a senior fellow with the Economic Policy Institute.
