I honestly don’t know. That’s why some sort of commission to study the subject would be a good idea. The fact is that African-Americans (and people of color in general) are burdened by societal assumptions and actions that people of European extraction are not currently burdened by. Waving your hands about and continuously screaming “I DIDN’T DO IT!” aren’t particularly helpful.
And neither is being overdramatic about those that don’t see any way reparations could possibly bring about any solutions to the plight a good percentage of African Americans face today.
Was I being overdramatic about the glut of dismissal of the very concept going on in this thread?
Is bringing up past injustices and saying that we should maybe consider addressing their reprecussions today “being overdramatic”?
certainly is, and if a “glib dismissal” is going on, it’s going on on both sides of the conversation.
Here’s a thought experiment that I think cuts through a lot of the bullshit:
Imagine we have a device that you wave over a fellow, and the device reports two things: (1) the amount that the person’s wealth has been negatively affected by intentionally racially discriminatory policies of the states or federal government; and (2) the amount the person is owed because government agents physically stole cash that the person would have inherited from their ancestors.
So, you wave this device over Peabody S. Jackson and it goes…whirrr…ding…BOOP: (1) $1500 for compensation for the effect that redlining had on his parents ability to accumulate and pass wealth on to him; and (2) $1500 for that bizarre heist of private citizens funds by the FBI in 1964 that took that amount from a grandfather who intended to bequeath it to him.
Would you support a bill that pays Peabody S. Jackson for (1) & (2)? Just (2)? Neither?
As more or a pragmatist (and a finance guy) I tend to cut to the money.
How much in reparations are we talking? Honestly, how much will African American’s need to make a difference commensurate with the elimination of the effects of slavery? $1,000 per? $10,000? $100,000? A million?
With roughly a 7:1 ratio of non-African Americans to African Americans, that’s ~$14,000 for every non-African American to pay for each African American to receive $100,000. $140,000 for a million. Doable I suppose.
I have three questions.
Do we really think $100,000 or $1,000,000 will solve this problem?
Would these transfer payment cause just more additional ill will toward African Americans?
If this doesn’t put everyone on equal footing (however we define that) what will the next generation say? Will they demand another round of reparations?
One writer suggests about $33,300, which would instantly close the wealth gap.
The same writer suggests that it should be the US government that pays, not individual Americans.
I think it (perhaps the $33.3K suggested in the link above) might help – and it might help a great deal. The only thing that will ultimately solve it is time, but I think some sort of compensatory payments (or some other compensation) might greatly accelerate that.
Possibly.
It’s possible. These are decent questions.
The same writer suggests that it should be the US government that pays, not individual Americans. :smack:
Huh?
What would it cost to determine the descendants of slaves actually were, and how long would such an undertaking take to complete?
spifflog: Read the article. The writer is talking about QEII style monetary injections. In theory, that should lead to inflation, all else being equal, which everyone would pay for. In practice, it is unclear. So it isn’t a crazy distinction to make between the government paying and individuals paying.
It’s also the relevant moral category: when you come to this country not by force, you agree to a social contract in which both the fruits and debts of the government become your problem. That’s why even the person who immigrated in 2014 is obligated to pay for police brutality by federal agents in 2005, or reparations for conduct from 1964. Reparations are a debt owed by the state.
Good question. There are probably several ways – self reporting, DNA analysis, past census results, or some combination. And considering that many black people who are not the descendants of slaves also suffered from things like Jim Crow and housing discrimination, we may not only want to include descendants of slaves.
He also wrote
This writer is nucking futs.
The Federal Reserve prints out nearly that much money just for “quantitative easing”. He’s not nuts; he’s been a good economics blogger for many years (even when I disagree with him).
So we should print upwards of 5 trillion funnybucks instead?
???
Sorry, my calculator burped. That’s still of a trillion and a third funnybucks dumped into the system.
And if we dumped a trillion and a third “funnybucks” into the system, the economy would surely collapse, or some other horrible economic malady would occur, right?
Well, we know now that it isn’t so simple, since we just did exactly that and we’re not seeing runaway inflation. Or really any inflation. That doesn’t mean paying for reparations with quantitative easing-style policies is risk-free. But it does mean that the sarcasm and tonal eye-rolling is pretty deeply misplaced.
No, we did not do “just exactly that”, and(if quantitative easing was just a matter of printing up extra money…and it certainly isn’t) doubling that amount all of a sudden and thinking that the economy wouldn’t tank is equivalent to thinking that a trailer designed to carry 30,000 lbs. if carefully loaded and distributed would be fine and dandy if you dropped another 30,000 lbs. all of a sudden.