Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:53     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:You really think people are going to use this responsibly?



+1
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:52     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:$50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations.


The study quoted in the article estimated the cost at $80 billion.
After the $700 billion bank bailout in 2008 and the recent $2 trillion stimulus package it seems cheap in comparison.

Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:38     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:Creating the racial wealth gap was not race-neutral so why should the solution be? American descendants of slaves are owed cash reparations from the US government.


You can keep saying this. But there are theoretical issues (see the Reparations thread in the political forum) and economic issues (see above).
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:34     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Creating the racial wealth gap was not race-neutral so why should the solution be? American descendants of slaves are owed cash reparations from the US government.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:17     Subject: Re:"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?


Because there are poor whites, latinos, etc. (many of which are immigrants who came in 60s and 70s) who also do not have the benefit of generational wealth for hundreds of years.

And I take offense to the whole "we" in your statement -- my parents immigrated to the US in the 70s...with no generational wealth. They worked hard and sacrificed for me and my brother to go to college - my cousins and I were the first to go to college in our family. "We" didn't screw any specific race.

There is a big difference in supporting "systemic poverty" versus "systemic racism" both of which I agree exist. But it's ignorant to say only people of a certain race have systemic poverty.




I meant the collective "we" of America. You’re American. You don't get to choose which parts of that history you take. The country owes a debt, whether you or I personally contributed to it or not. Think of it like marriage.


Agree 100%

When you moved to this country, be it 5 or 50 years ago, you and your family benefited from privilege that was denied to those whose ancestors were brought here unwillingly hundreds of years before. The racism baked into the institutions of American society gave you (and other recent immigrants) the success that you experience now. You, and every other American in a position of privilege, need to help correct this past wrong - regardless of how long your family has been here. There is no opt out. You can’t just insist that the descendants of Southern slave owners and New England Yankee slave traders be on the hook for readjusting society in an equitable fashion.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:16     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?


+1

And all the jerks saying that it would worsen drug problems and subsidize Cadillac can GTFO with that bullshit.


+2

Bunch of racist jerks making stupid comments from their position of privilege


There are definitely lots of racist jerks on DCUM. But, this doesn't seem super-doable from a budget or logistic perspective. What does seem do-able is an all-out effort to fix public schools by raising the property tax (which would hit people with higher-value houses). Subsidize home mortgages for low-income people and pay for it by lowering the cap on mortgage interest for homes over $500,000 or whatever (which would hit people with higher-value houses). And so on.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 18:02     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?


+1

And all the jerks saying that it would worsen drug problems and subsidize Cadillac can GTFO with that bullshit.


+2

Bunch of racist jerks making stupid comments from their position of privilege
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:57     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:Ok, tax their wealth too. I have half a million in assets before age 40, so I'm sure that would get taxed too. Let's do it.


How are you going to do that? Are you going to make Charles Schwab, Fidelity, the TSP, and others report on how much people have in their investment accounts and 401(k)s? This will just encourage people to buy second homes on the Delaware Bay, or maybe in Portugal. Or, to spend their money on themselves in other ways before the government takes it away.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:49     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Ok, tax their wealth too. I have half a million in assets before age 40, so I'm sure that would get taxed too. Let's do it.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:47     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:$50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations.



Tax. The. Rich.


PP here. I meant $50,000 per kid, not per year. Just correcting myself.

But: you can impoverish Bill Gates and his ilk but you're still not going to raise enough funding for this. You're going to have to dip way down into the middle class. I used to work on Social Security and people were always saying, just eliminate the cap on how you only have to pay the FICA tax on your income up to $133,000 (that's the 2020 limit, aka taxable maximum), so that Bill Gates pays that 12.4% tax on all of his millions of dollars of annual income. And then don't pay him benefits because he doesn't need it. That was never enough to fix even Social Security; all the modeling showed that you'd still have to raise taxes on people with incomes down to about $60,000 to raise sufficient funding to make Social Security solvent. And Social Security only provides about $14,000 a year to the elderly (nowhere close to $50,000), even as we're assuming the additional FICA tax revenue from taxing Bill Gates would also be annual.

People thought this was such an obvious fix, and so did I when I first heard it, but really careful modeling says otherwise. The one percent is actually less of a target than their individual massive wealth would lead us to think. I'm all for putting the estate tax thresholds back to where they used to be, at a million or so, FWIW.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:31     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:$50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations.



Tax. The. Rich.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:30     Subject: "A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
$50,000 a year is not "cheap," especially in our current budget situation. We'd be saddling all of our kids, including black kids, with paying off the debt for generations. Even Clinton was only talking about $1,000 to $2,000 per kid. I have a feeling this wouldn't live up to peoples' expectations.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:21     Subject: Re:"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
The country owes a debt


I disagree. I don't believe in reparations.

I believe in addressing systemic poverty regardless of race. Not all poor POC in the US came from slaves.
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:20     Subject: Re:"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?


Because there are poor whites, latinos, etc. (many of which are immigrants who came in 60s and 70s) who also do not have the benefit of generational wealth for hundreds of years.

And I take offense to the whole "we" in your statement -- my parents immigrated to the US in the 70s...with no generational wealth. They worked hard and sacrificed for me and my brother to go to college - my cousins and I were the first to go to college in our family. "We" didn't screw any specific race.

There is a big difference in supporting "systemic poverty" versus "systemic racism" both of which I agree exist. But it's ignorant to say only people of a certain race have systemic poverty.




I meant the collective "we" of America. You’re American. You don't get to choose which parts of that history you take. The country owes a debt, whether you or I personally contributed to it or not. Think of it like marriage.


We can also address both. It's great to work on poverty issues. We also need to work on race issues. You can't solve race issues by only addressing poverty issues (and vice-versa!).
Anonymous
Post 06/29/2020 17:14     Subject: Re:"A Cheap, Race-Neutral Way to Close the Racial Wealth Gap..
Anonymous wrote:
Why does it have to be race blind? Why can't we acknowledge that we screwed a specific race of people out of their income and the ability to build generational wealth for hundreds of years, and that it's high time we made it right?


Because there are poor whites, latinos, etc. (many of which are immigrants who came in 60s and 70s) who also do not have the benefit of generational wealth for hundreds of years.

And I take offense to the whole "we" in your statement -- my parents immigrated to the US in the 70s...with no generational wealth. They worked hard and sacrificed for me and my brother to go to college - my cousins and I were the first to go to college in our family. "We" didn't screw any specific race.

There is a big difference in supporting "systemic poverty" versus "systemic racism" both of which I agree exist. But it's ignorant to say only people of a certain race have systemic poverty.




I meant the collective "we" of America. You’re American. You don't get to choose which parts of that history you take. The country owes a debt, whether you or I personally contributed to it or not. Think of it like marriage.