Al Sharpton is known as a “professional poverty pimp” and a “race hustler,” to use the phrase coined by economist Walter E. Williams. Sharpton sells poverty to the highest bidder. For the past 30 years that’s been the Democrats. He tells his fellow-Blacks that if they vote for Democrats, life will be better for them. Under Sharpton’s self-appointed Black leadership, poverty among Blacks has increased along with declining test scores, intact families, and illegitimacy. Consider the “The Poverty Pimp’s Poem”:

Let us celebrate the poor,
Let us hawk them door to door.
There’s a market for their pain,
Votes and glory and money to gain.
Let us celebrate the poor.
Their ills, their sins, their faulty diction
Flavor our songs and spice our fiction.
Their hopes and struggles and agonies
Get us grants and consulting fees.
Celebrate thugs and clowns,
Give their ignorance all renown.
Celebrate what holds them down,
In our academic gowns.
Let us celebrate the poor.1

The declining Black American family has been the direct result of failed government policies that have made Blacks dependant on the government. That’s what a pimp does. It keeps him in business.

Sharpton has been caught so many times peddling his own Black people to the Democrats that not too long ago he tried to get the FCC involved in regulating the Rush Limbaugh Show because the conservative talk host was exposing Sharpton as a charlatan who was hurting Blacks:

Rush Limbaugh has the right to say whatever he wants to say. He can’t do it on publicly regulated air waves. The FCC has the responsibility to set standards to say that the public cannot be offended based on . . . race or gender in this country, . . .

Sharpton was upset that Limbaugh had repeatedly called Democrat policies “reparations” for slavery. Here’s how Limbaugh put it, and he had Sharpton and fellow-“Justice Brother” Jesse Jackson in mind with his comments:

“The objective is unemployment, the objective is more food stamp benefits, the objective is more unemployment benefits, the objective is an expanding welfare state,” Limbaugh said on May 11, 2010. “The objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return it to the nation’s ‘rightful owners.’ Think reparations. Think forced reparations.”

Now we learn that the poverty pimping ways of Sharpton are about to come to an end. Sharpton’s empire, including the National Action Network and two for-profit companies, are more than $5 million in the red. Here’s the interesting part as Liberal Democrats keep banging the drum that the rich need to pay their fair share in taxes. Most of the National Action Network’s money problems are the result of the organization not paying “more than $880,000 in federal payroll taxes, interest, and penalties.

Sharpton drew a $241,732 salary and perks that included first-class or charter air travel, tax filings show. He owes the IRS $2.6 million in income tax, and nearly $900,000 in state tax.

The defunct Rev-Al Communications Inc. owes the state almost $176,000, and Bo-Spanky is $3,500 behind on state-tax liens.

You may recall that some rich millionaires signed a petition that they were onboard to pay more in taxes. But when they were asked to make a voluntary contribution, something the Federal Government makes available to all tax payers, they declined.

Al Sharpton lives high on the hog, including first-class and charter air travel, while he extorts money from people to push his anti-poverty agenda.

When the non-profit company where I’ve worked for 30 years suffered in the financial downturn, I immediately cut my salary. The following year, I stopped taking a salary. When one of the for-profit companies I co-own got behind paying its payroll taxes, my business partner and I paid the taxes personally.

Government isn’t the solution; personal responsibility is. Yes, I know government is rigged, but that does not give us the excuse of skirting our own personal responsibilities.

The Liberal solution to everything is more taxes on the rich and more spending for everyone else. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in a television interview in 1976 said, “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They [socialists] always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”

People like Sharpton don’t care. Their goal is to milk the system for all they can before the cow dies. Thatcher’s maxim is once again proven true in the financial exploits of Al Sharpton. Will Blacks care? I doubt it.

1. Thomas Sowell, “The Poverty Pimp’s Poem,” Jewish World Review (October 30, 1998). [↩]