income in the Clinton years

[John Gulick]

To what do you or does anybody else attribute the relatively more
rapid growth of African-American incomes, no matter the quintile ?
I could hazard some theories but I'd probably be wasting my breath.
In any event, unsurprisingly I think this phenomenon has something
to do with the ever-more profound loyalty of black voters to the
Dems and the hostility vented by the NAACP and other black "leaders"
and "opinion-makers" (save radical academics like Manning Marable
and Robin Kelley) toward Nader and the Greens. In the last 8 years
those African-Americans that vote have been captivated by distributionist
politics, despite the casualties of the drug war, welfare reform, etc. 
I'm not one to bemoan Nader "stealing" the election from Gore, but I do
think that the politics of left ecology must begin and end with the largely
minority
urban working class, and the fallout from this election is going to sunder
the building of a left ecology movement rooted in this constituency for
quite some time. I hope I'm wrong.

John Gulick

Doug Henwood wrote:

There was a question about income growth during the Clinton years. 
Here are the Census figures by quintile and the top 5% - real income 
growth from 1992 to 1999. 

                    all white black Hispanic 
poorest 14.9% 12.1% 26.5% 21.4% 
2nd 13.2% 10.8% 34.9% 19.1% 
middle 12.4% 11.2% 26.8% 14.3% 
4th 13.8% 13.0% 23.3% 14.6% 
top 25.2% 25.0% 28.1% 20.8% 

top 5% 37.1% 38.0% 32.6% 30.1%