Um, if you give 45 million people a million dollars each, that’s 45 trillion dollars you’ve just printed up and injected into the economy. By comparison, the CIA’s world factbook puts the Gross World Product at about $40.7 trillion.
Without addressing the merits of the idea, and recognizing that the arithmetic question has been spoken to, let me add that any such plan would require that the federal government establish a standard for deciding who is “black” and I think that is something nobody currently in a policy-making position cares to deal with.
Did you see any of the Census bureau’s palaver on the subject of one’s perception of racial identity during the lead up to last year’s census? I gathered their position was that, lacking any substantive challenge to what anybody might say, they are letting it go with whatever “race” one feels they belong to.
As the concept of “race” is (while some, myself included, feel it a flawed concept) at best an idea for which nobody has yet come up with a relatively unassailable definition, I think if you start handing out retirement now! sums based on race, a lot of people might well start feeling black. Or, perhaps you’d try and do this based on tracing a person’s personal history back to whether they have a great-great-grandparent who arrived here as a slave or they came here voluntarily from Nigeria in 1969.
Hey, that would be great. I think black people truly deserve reparations for the indignities they had to deal with in being shipped over here to work as slaves. I find that a truly disgusting part of American history, and anything we can do to alleviate that is good in my book.
But then I remember that I am American Indian, Native Alaskan to be exact, and that our people were slaughtered so indiscrimately that people, to this day, are surprised that we still exist. You would think that would count for something. Maybe the million dollars you mentioned. Or did you forget about us?
Let’s see. . . After the emancipation proclamation “black folk” were legally free, if not socially so. At least you were acknowledged. For a hundred years after that Native Americans were still being slaughtered and shunted off because we lived on “desirable lands” (Note: All land, except for the shit nothing could grow on.)
So, hey, I think we should be part of that million to each. It would cost a lot less to give it to us. Is this ever going to happen? No. Never.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Now, now, everyone. The OP did specifically say “I don’t want this to turn into a debate over if it is right or wrong”. So, to answer the GQ part of the question:
Yes, paying out 110% of the entire annual Gross World Product would likely produce a modicum of inflation.
A hundred years after the … wait a minute. The Emancipation Proclamation went into effect at the beginning of 1863. You’re saying that Native Americans were still being slaughtered as late as 1963?
will freefall into an inflation nightmare due to 45 million less workers.
But beyond that, let me add a…um…slightly pit-worthy response to the mix. The moment you give 1 million dollars because of something that happened 140 years ago is the moment I line up asking for my handout too. Why, you ask? Well, the stigma I face on a daily basis because my great great great great great great grandfather owned slaves.
No, he probably didn’t. Good chance was he was putzing around Eastern Europe at the time, but I see the looks on people’s faces as I walk down the street and I know what they’re thinking “damn that bastard! How can he be so smug when his great great great great great great grandfather probably owned slaves.”
No, they don’t think that. I also don’t think that blacks are slaves anymore. I don’t think any blacks have been subjected to slavery in their lifetime, nor do they know any that have. So I’m sorry if my heart doesn’t bleed for them today and my checkbook doesn’t open up for them.
Because that’s where it’s coming from, you know. The government doesn’t just print money like it’s an illegal basement press. The money has to come from somewhere, it has to have tangible goods backing up the cottony green fabric. That’s where we come in.
I can also tell you that a good deal of blacks would be insulted at the idea of taking money at the expense of others for crimes that weren’t committed against them. Why? They’ve made their way in the world and aren’t looking for government handouts.
Oh yeah…you want to see REAL racial oppression? Go on, give them all a million dollars and sit back and watch the fun. Me? I’ll be hiding out in a bunker for the next decade hoping a few actually survive the riots.
Actually no, that would just be the start of our worries. Let me show you how. Realize I don’t have a cite for this, I’m pulling numbers out of my nether region. But if anyone wants to call me on it, feel free.
Let’s assume 400 million Americans of which 300 million are of age and able to work. Let’s also assume a 5% unemployment rate, or 15 million people. These are people the government has defined as able to work and has been looking in the past month. Now, suddenly, we have 45 million people who no longer need to work. How about we assume that 35 million of them held jobs in the first place.
A lot of assumptions, but the end result is that instead of an unemployment rate of 5%, we now have employers desperately looking for 20 million new workers that aren’t out there. That’s an 11.6% shift!
Those that are still working have not only have to make up for the work that the non-existant coworkers are doing, but they also see just how in demand they really are. They ask for more money, companies have no choice but to comply (there’s no one else who can do the job!), the companies raise prices to make up for employee cost, making cost of living go up, making employees as for more money, until $1 million doesn’t seem like that much money anymore.
My point is that if you give 45 million people a million dollars each, that’s 45 trillion dollars, which is somewhat more than the annual economic output of the entire planet Earth. By contrast, the U.S. federal budget still hasn’t cracked the $2 trillion mark.
I suppose someone should have checked up on this sooner, but the Census numbers indicate there are only about 35 million black people in the U.S. This means that if you gave each of them $1 million, you would “only” be paying out about $35 trillion, or approximately 86% of the Gross World Product. This doesn’t really materially alter any of the arguments in this thread, of course–if we did give every black person in the U.S. a million bucks, monetarily speaking we’d all be reduced to trying to figure out how many chickens are equal to one roll of toilet paper within a matter of hours. Thus, all of the new black millionaires would still have to work for a living (i.e., forage for food, fight off the starving mobs in to-the-death battles over canned goods, etc.) along with everyone else. On the bright side, if they were paid up in cash they might at least have a start on the toilet paper problem.
