But you were making an argument based on how HUGE the numbers are, implying that the numbers are SO big that, even if we wanted to do it, there’s no way the country could afford it. This was so important to you that you used massive font to point out how huge the number was.
I’m simply pointing out that, in the scale of national economies, the sort of numbers you’re talking about are nowhere near as big as you were asserting. Yes, $1 trillion is a lot of money, but it’s well within the capacities of an economy the size of America’s, at least in normal economic times (right now, i’m not so sure).
And $62 billion is, as Boyo Jim points out, pretty much chump change. If we had pulled out of Iraq 6 months ago, that would already have saved us $60 billion right there.
I’m making no argument either way about reparations. I tend to agree with you that it’s a rather impractical and probably misguided way to deal with inequity. I’d prefer to acknowledge the injustices of the past, and then find a way to deal with the legacies they have left for the present.
This beautifully summarizes my feelings about this thread. I would have tried to say it myself, but it would have been too wordy and it’s hard enough making it through some of these lengthy posts.
[QUOTE=you with the face]
I thought the OP wasn’t the most compelling piece of argumentation in the land, but there was nothing trollish or wacky about it.
[QUOTE]
You must not have seen J.H.C’s other topics, haha.
I’m not mocking you for making a typo- the gods know I make enough of them- but DIFFERNET should be a word. Someone should reserve it as a domain and use it as a forum for opposing views. (Unfortunately like pretty much all other arrangements of words the differnet dotcoms and dotnets are taken, but there’s nothing actually remotely like viewpoints at those sites.)
Yeah. I posted that post, left the computer, left the building, was three blocks away, realized I was going to get called on it, came back, & tried to a) apologize for accusing people of racism, & b) explain why those of us even vaguely acquainted with the sordid history of Jim Crow get upset about it.
As for my username “containing a racial slur,” I’m of Scots descent & named myself after the old UK coin. Want to make something of it?
Maybe that’s because nobody can. Or maybe it’s just because those feelings are expressed so often and so vigorously when no such accusation has even been made that folks are beginning to realize it’s not actually part of the discussion. It’s just a thinly-veilled attempt to halt the discussion, kind of like all the baroquely intricate and uniformly misbegotten and dimwitted disquisitions on Southern history and heritage that some people need to throw on top of the fact that contemporary displays of the Confederate battle flag offend a lot of people (synopsis for those born this afternoon: it’s also important to home-grown Confederate historians to know about slavery, but keeping a slave in your basement today is considered rude, as is flying the disgraced banner of a failed and contemptible ideology, no matter what grandpappy said).
In any event, it’s irrelevant now that (as mhendo pointed out much more gently than was deserved) Sampiro has been effectively been beaten up by his own straw man. Abandoning his original stupid arguments against reparations (which I had insensitively pointed out were stupid), he made up what he thought to be an absurdly high cost estimate for them, only to find out that he hadn’t made up out of whole cloth a number quite high enough. Bad enough when you have to put words in your opponents’ mouths to win an argument: so much worse when even after you do it, you’re still losing.
I honestly don’t care enough to read this whole thread, but I just wanted to say that this line was Omazing and that I’m definitely going to use it in the future. Keep up the good work, oh master wordsmith.
