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

[Huggy Bear]

@Ranjr

I wouldn't say that reparations are "help", reparations is what the U.S. owes for forcing a group of people to build it for free.

I don't often agree with you, but I think you hit it on the head here.

Hey Thump! Haven't seen you in a while.

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Stop it, money can purchase all of that, funny how when it comes to other groups, no one has a problem with cash...

California city to give transgender and nonbinary residents up to $900 a month

And do you still have enough money to actually take care of a lot of those things? If the answer is yes, are there still a lot of black people who don't? And, to be perfectly blunt, doesn't Western Europe cover a lot of the things Angrboda suggested as a baseline for everybody? And is there a good reason America can't do the same, with the possible exception of "because the Republican Party is vehemently opposed to using the government to actually help people, except maybe if we can somehow produce utopian results almost instantly with minimal effort, and even that's a huge maybe"?

Estimates for reparations range from 10 to 50 trillion, if we take 20 trillion and divide it by the black population, without even subtracting those that wouldn't qualify, you end up with $500,000 per person, but more than likely it would be distributed according to household, which would equate to two million dollars per household.

[Rev. Rye]

And, just for the record, $20 trillion is almost the entire GDP of America. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren't aware of that or the implications, because if you were, what you're basically asking for is a revanchist system where the balance of power is reversed and we basically have even worse inequality than we do now (except with black people not being the one suffering this time.)

[arewethereyet]

Instead of monetary reparations, why not provide passes which make one eligible for free education, training, healthcare, child care, pre-natal services, and so on?

Stop it, money can purchase all of that, funny how when it comes to other groups, no one has a problem with cash...

California city to give transgender and nonbinary residents up to $900 a month

Does this mean that bi or trans black people from that city are going to make bank?  Seems they should be able to draw from both.

[The Architect Of Fate]

Stop it, money can purchase all of that, funny how when it comes to other groups, no one has a problem with cash...

California city to give transgender and nonbinary residents up to $900 a month

Congrats a city can afford to give trans people a check. That's not really relevant to giving every descendant of slaves a check.

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Estimates for reparations range from 10 to 50 trillion, if we take 20 trillion and divide it by the black population, without even subtracting those that wouldn't qualify, you end up with $500,000 per person, but more than likely it would be distributed according to household, which would equate to two million dollars per household.

I don't think you comprehend the gravity of those numbers

[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.

[Silver]

The irony, of course, is that the southern territories actually known for slave farms aren't going to implement the reparations to benefit decendents of slaves living in those states.

[Ranjr]

How much are slave descendants out for being black?  What are the damages?  Lower wages.  That's figurable.  More traffic stops.  Hard to quantify due to confounding variables.  The occasional traffic stop turned murder by cop.  Should be payed to individual families, not to all.  So, in general, lower wages.  What else can we add?  

While we're at it.  How much do we owe Mexico for Texas?

[Anomalocaris]

I don't often agree with you, but I think you hit it on the head here.

Hey Thump! Haven't seen you in a while.

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And do you still have enough money to actually take care of a lot of those things? If the answer is yes, are there still a lot of black people who don't? And, to be perfectly blunt, doesn't Western Europe cover a lot of the things Angrboda suggested as a baseline for everybody? And is there a good reason America can't do the same, with the possible exception of "because the Republican Party is vehemently opposed to using the government to actually help people, except maybe if we can somehow produce utopian results almost instantly with minimal effort, and even that's a huge maybe"?

Estimates for reparations range from 10 to 50 trillion, if we take 20 trillion and divide it by the black population, without even subtracting those that wouldn't qualify, you end up with $500,000 per person, but more than likely it would be distributed according to household, which would equate to two million dollars per household.

I think you believe this idiocy for the same reason that you imagine black people consist entirely of supposedly highly valuable melanin, and have no other constituent components.   Not brains, bones, internal organs, muscles, blood and other bodily fluids, tendons, ligaments and connective tissues, whatsoever.

I can’t say for your other parts, but you certainly correct in that you have no brains now.   I also can’t say whether you were born with melanin instead of brains, or if some transformation occurred that turned your brain into melanin after you’ve irradiated with glowing image of imagery dollar signs.

[Huggy Bear]

And, just for the record, $20 trillion is almost the entire GDP of America. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you weren't aware of that or the implications, because if you were, what you're basically asking for is a revanchist system where the balance of power is reversed and we basically have even worse inequality than we do now (except with black people not being the one suffering this time.)

It doesn't have to be paid all at once, we'll accept a payment plan...

[Rev. Rye]

Judging by the US' tax revenues, we could potentially do it in six years, provided we eliminate funding for literally everything else. You sure you don't want programs aimed at eliminating the racial wealth gap so we can actually take steps to neutralise the lingering effects of slavery? Just a largely symbolic series of checks?