There is no more room for white Americans to say, "We do not have the money to pay for reparations". We have trillions of recent examples, for example in the multiple trillion dollars spent on COVID relief and the tax cut for billiionaires in 2017. Plus we can add the Iraq War, and the over stay in Afghanistan. Also the 2008-09 bailouts of banks. And all of those were "discretionary", as to the normal budget.
All of those were at least worth as much as righting a 400 year old mistake, that my/our white ancestors were too weak and racist to deal with. We have the money, so should have the courage to do it as well.
Additionally, as Stephanie Kelton says in her book, The Deficit Myth, (video link below) we can "print" all the money we "need", since we are a sovereign nation. That is exactly how we are paying all the overages noted above. What I wrote above shows the blatant lie in the statement that "reparations would be too costly".
The way to prove it is to understand a national debt like ours. It is always being paid for by others, investors that is. Each Treasury (T) Bill is snapped up by investment banks, big institutional investors, and others as fast as they are issued, because they are the safest investment in the world, ever. If we zeroed out our debt, that would end T-Bills. Not a good idea.
Ironically, the government could simply zero out the debt if it wanted to. There is nothing necessarily stopping our government. That is what a sovereign country can do, whereas Ireland and Greece ran in to problems because they are EU members, not sovereign over their money supply. The EU provides other benefits, but the better off countries can squeeze any that fall into debt. States are not sovereign, that is why they can't print money or go into debt.
Sovereign nations like the U.S. ARE NOT like a business or a family budget. It is an inaccurate statement when pundits say such. Call people out when they make the comparison, it is wrong. It is why the gold standard was terrible; it turned our nation into a business, family budget or a state. It gave us no flexibility during a crisis. Inflation would go wild under the gold standard, eliminating wealth overnight, and decimate the value of everyone's money.
So let's do reparations, deal directly and forthrightly with our systemic racism in other areas, and get on with healing and improving our nation in every other way. We cannot afford to spend on every whim, but slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc. were NOT done on a whim, therefore, must be expunged as much as possible. And just because our feeble and weak minded white ancestors never took responsibility, whites today can, should, and must be personally responsible.
Or does personal responsibility only go so far for whites?
Again, we cannot make everybody billionaires or millionaires using our Treasury, but strategic things can be accomplished, without even increasing taxes. Taxes are part of the mix, a big reason is to curb the harms of extreme inequality, but for major investments, we can loan it too ourselves. Yes, we must contribute to the experiment, and keep doing our work. Everyone doesn't get to retire tomorrow. However, we are worth the investment, and will prove it by doing our part.
RTC
Deficit Myth video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9pAPIUYXxQ
