Closing racial wage gap in just 20 occupations would boost millions of Black Americans
CBSN
About 2 million Black Americans could climb into the middle class if they were given equal wages as their White co-workers, a new study from corporate consulting firm McKinsey estimates.
Moving that many people to the middle class would benefit the larger U.S. economy as well as Black communities, said Shelley Stewart III, a McKinsey partner who led the study released Thursday. Newly minted middle-class families would have much less need for public assistance like food stamps and housing vouchers, thus reducing U.S. government spending on social service programs, Stewart said. Black households would earn an extra $220 billion in wages annually if the racial wealth gap were erased, and that in turn would generate more income for federal and state governments to tax, he added.Two Native Hawaiian brothers who were convicted in the 1991 killing of a woman visiting Hawaii allege in a federal lawsuit that local police framed them "under immense pressure to solve the high-profile murder" then botched an investigation last year that would have revealed the real killer using advancements in DNA technology.
In one of his first acts after returning to the Oval Office this week, President Trump tasked federal agencies with developing ways to potentially ease prices for U.S. consumers. But experts warn that his administration's crackdown on immigration could both drive up inflation as well as hurt a range of businesses by shrinking the nation's workforce.
Meta is denying claims circulating on social media that it forced Facebook and Instagram users to follow President Trump's official accounts, saying the changes some users noticed were standard practices tied to the transition of the POTUS account from the previous administration to the incoming one.