Reply to It's (finally) time for reparations. It's time for the US to pay its debt.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I don't believe any person or group  is entitled to reparations for anything that happened to people in a prior generation under any circumstances, no matter how horrible that was.[/quote]

And like I've said previously, there is current harm from slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, etc. 
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Can you please explain why cash is better than directly addressing the systemic causes of wealth gaps with better K-12, college and housing subsidies, universal health care, etc? Assume (because this is reality) that we can’t do both.

It seems like somebody who gets $50k could put it to college, but then the returns to Blacks from a college education is lower than the returns to whites. Plus $50k covers less than half of a good state college, so where does remaining tuition come from?

To buy a house in a better school district, you’d have to save that $50k for decades until it became several hundred thousand dollars. This is because $50k could be a deposit on a house, but it won’t pay the mortgage going forward, especially if this drives up housing prices and mortgage balances. So you need savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep topping up the payments from your low income.

What has that $50k accomplished, then? It hasn’t even helped prepare kids for college (fix failing public schools) or improved healthcare or improved housing choices.

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DP. I agree that an individual cash stipend won't solve this. It would be like every AA winning a very small powerball jackpot.  Some shrewd jackpot winners save or invest their money, many spend it immediately and then fall back into old patterns which are hard to break and associated with poverty. IT really wouldn't end or address systemic racism; instead it would be more likely to end the public discussion.[/quote]

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