California about to be the first state to administer reparations!s

[Rev. Rye]

And a little further perspective, using Huggy's figure of $20 trillion divided among 40 million black people, subtract that from a total US GDP of $20.951 trillion in 2020 and 329 million population.

This basically leaves $951 billion to be divided among 289 million people. GDP per capita for everyone who isn't black: $3,290.66 (Closest GDP per capita comparison: the Philippines). Now compare that to the $500,000 that Huggy's plan would give every black person (a bit more than the richest three countries per capita combined). The last time I checked, the wealth ratio between white and black people is somewhere in the area of 7 to 1. This is already bad enough, but if Huggy's plan goes through, it'd be something like 152 to 1 in the other direction.

And that's not even getting into the fact that $20 trillion is itself still a ridiculously conservative number. As I mentioned earlier, there's also the figure mentioned in a 2000 article in Harpers that tallies the cost at $97 trillion (an astronomical cost that, depending on the way you count GDP is either more than all the economies of the world combined or merely about 80% of that tally), and even that's absurdly conservsative, since one of the figures that it used to start with was a total of 222,505,049 man-hours' work that count towards the total. Divide that by the 246 years between the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia in 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865, and we get a total of 904,492 man-hours per year. While I don't know what a good baseline average slave population per year would be, this would almost certainly add up to significantly less than an 8-hour work day per year per slave, and very likely less than an hour's work per year per slave. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that slavery wasn't just for a single hour a year.

And this is why I prefer programs to help eliminate that wage gap as part of a broader set of programs to neutralise the effects of systemic racism. While it might take generations to close that gap, it also has the advantage of A) actually giving more results than just giving black families a blank check,and B) not immediately tanking the economy.