Let's come up with a modest, doable plan for reparations, math worked out, since Bernie, Kamala and nobody else has one.
First we need a number of total slaves.
In 1850 there were 3,500,000 slaves in America. 12,000,000 slaves total were bought over from Africa.
We have to calculate for the brutality of slavery, the deaths of slaves en route from Africa, the death of millions of slaves due to brutal work conditions, the lower life expectancy due to those same conditions.
We MUST account for the massive war crime of organized, government sanctioned rape against an unarmed civilian populace, a rape so widespread as to literally change the complexion of the African's bought over into the brown people we see today - a new race was quite literally raped into existence in slavery. We have to account for the millions of unjust and unjustifiable murders for whom justice was neither sought or delivered.
Let's cram all of the above factors and circumstances into a "Brutality Fudge Factor" henceforth called the BFF. Let's combine a very modest BFF with the known population of slaves and find an average slave population in America of 1,000,000 working slaves per year for our tenure in slavery. All that brutality in a nice round number.
Today's farmers earn about $60,000 per year, but again we are trying to be modest. Let's pay our enslaved farmers a nice round number, not the living wage, not a farmers wage, but a nice round number around the minimum wage - $10 per hour. We will assume America's Slaves worked a 40 hour week for the sake of this conversation, with no benefits - lol.
So if we have 1,000,000 slaves per year, working a standard 40 hour work week with 2 weeks of vacation at $10 per hour for 400 years, the total bill to these United States of America for that labor would be about $8,000,000,000 ($8 trillion).
We will ignore interest for the last 150 years. We will ignore sharecropping. Jim Crow, New Jim Crow, weaponization of the prisons. abortions and the deliberate weaponization of Black culture (the most destructive of all forces). Just a nice round number for Slave Wages Owed - $8 trillion.
If that money is invested in USA Treasury bills earning 3% interest per year, Slavery Bonds let's call them, the interest on that money would be enough to pay every African American, all 40,000,000 of us, about $500 / month. Modest, right?
$500 per month is the total reparations bill for 400 years of slavery, a fraction of the proposed "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) to finally pay the slaves! A single lump sum that is a fraction of what we owe everyone else already. $0.40 cents on the dollar of our existing national debt to pay off reparations for slavery - just add it to the bill, right?
--- Arguments Against UBI for Slavery---
The fact that welfare is more than $500 per month is irrelevant because welfare is not for all Black people nor is it for only Black people. Slavery was, in fact, for all Black people and only Black people.
We would not want to incentivize more bastardization in the Black community, since that is 95% of our problem right now is single parent households. So we would want to take the $500 / month and put in trust for every child so that by their 25th birthday each descendant of slaves would "inherit" an account with more than $100,000 in it.
I think that although the proposal is fair, just and equitable - it is a horrible idea because it teaches Black America to eat from a spoon rather than learn to hunt. If you combine our weaponized culture, our ignorant masses, and $100,000 we will get raped again, and we will lose our will to hunt in the process. But since the main bulk funding is never touched, only the interest, Black America will evolve out of our simple ways over time, but instead of evolving out of poverty, we will evolve with capital to invest and those of us who were always going to be alright, will continue to be more alright, and those of us who were always going to fail, will find a coushin.
I think we should value the poverty as it has made us strong, all we Black people need is the wisdom that a two parent home provides and we will pull ourselves out and be the most battle hardened people on Earth once we do stand up - but that argument is weak in the face of what many poor people go through - generational ignorance that will never see how it is done. $500 in a forced savings account can be an epic life changing event for a person whose parents would not have enough money to bury themselves, much less pass on.
Bernie wants a "Universal Basic Income" - let's try a $500 per month UBI on a small test group of people to whom it is actually owed. All for a modest one time payment that would barely impact the national debt.
Bernie and Kamala and Warren keep saying "I don't know what reparations look like". Here is what reparations look like.
