Reparations?

[Speedy]

I’m good with cash.

[Ca Bob]

I'm not convinced by the argument that there has to be an accurate accounting of exactly which person was in slavery until the end of the Civil War and who that person's descendants are. Probably 99.8% of living Black Americans have slave descendants, some going back to 1865 and some going back a lot further. So treating this entire population as the reparation group is logical and would probably be the only way to do it. The only other respectable question is how much money we are talking about. Would 300 billion dollars be enough? Right now the Black population in the US is somewhere around 47 million people so that number is low. If the reparation were $100,000 per person, it would come to a total of just under 5 trillion dollars. At 10,000 dollars per person, it would come to around half a trillion dollars, which would be well within reach. If there were some other way of distributing such as on a family basis, then it would be possible to distribute well above 10,000 dollars per family and a mere 200 billion dollars would be a start.

There are other possible approaches such as a federal scholarship program for both private high schools and for college costs, which might be thought of as reparations but would also be equivalent to moving us closer to a European model for higher education.

In other words, there is nothing to stop us from doing something except for the Republicans in the Senate and the current recession. However, feeding a lot of money into the economy through paying it to Black Americans could be thought of as an economic stimulus program.

[Ca Bob]

PS: The last time I looked (decades ago) the price of farm land was somewhere in the one to two thousand dollars per acre range. That would make the current value of 40 acres and a mule as somewhere in the 40 to 80 thousand dollar range, and the mule would be a little more. This does not mean that 40 acres and a tractor is a good goal considering the economics of modern agriculture, but the overall dollar value of that land and mule can be considered.

If I understand correctly there never was an offer or promise of 40 acres and a mule. It seems to have been a rumor that was passed around freely because it sounded good.

One other thought that will come across as a little angry: The southerners (and yes, some northerners) made a lot of money selling slaves, and for slave owners, there was a lot of net worth in their ownership of human beings. I don't remember any suggestion that the former slave owners should have been instructed to pay the former slaves what they had paid for them originally, or something along those lines. It's clear that there was no attempt to make things right for former slaves or their families or descendants. The fact that this is overdue does not mean it goes away as a moral obligation, any more than people who stole valuables from Jews during the Nazi days have the right to keep them now. Nor do their descendants or even the museums that got possession. I suggest that these two questions are analogous.