Reperations questions

No amount of money is going to wipe away the 400 years of chattel slavery.

However, just like civil suit were the family of the injured or deceased gets paid for being involved in an incident that was the fault of someone else… at least paying would be an intentional action specifically toward the slaves and their descendants that says “we (US Government) are sorry”.

I am sure we can come to a nice number…

How much is 400 years of free labor worth… adjusting for inflation?

So enough to bankrupt the country. That’s what this is all about, a money grab. Nice.

If there is discrimination against anybody right now, they should be compensated, but that is under law right now. I don’t think institutional guilt is relevant this long after it was ended with the loss of more lives in that war than all other deaths in other wars combined if I’m not mistaken. I would be intrigued for you to mention the Scripture, even if it is OT, that you think warrants such a concept, though of course that can not be used in debate in this secular government. The fight and achievement of civil rights, with the great work of Martin Luther King and others helped at least put us on the path to justice. I don’t think spending government money towards finding who is a descendent of real slaves, and giving them a tax break so they don’t have to pay money at all does any good, because my and my wife’s family descendants, who were not around in this country at the time the civil war was fought, have to pay more taxes, if someone gets the benefit of not getting taxed, we have to make up for it.

Is it a money grab when you are grabbing your own money?

No you may not have to pay more taxes…

We just double the deficit so that businesses can be taxed less. Why can’t we double the deficit so slave descendants can get what they had denied to them for 400 years?

So they’re paying their own reparations?

I didn’t have anything to do with FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans and the US gave reparations to them.

Along similar lines of reparations: Tuskegee-40 years later, Rosewood-70 years later.

Why? Why would you demand all Dems support reparations? Republicans are not monolithic in all items in their platform so there is no reason to expect that from Democrats.

I didn’t say all Democrats had to support it. I said that “if we are to have reparations” Democrats need to support it. Surely you don’t expect Republicans to put that in their platform?

I absolutely don’t expect them to… that is why I hope Dems fully adopt this. I’ll grab my popcorn and try to see Republicans explain why they don’t feel the need to pay for unpaid labor.

Anyone talking about that should look up the crown jewel of that Bureau and the only real thing to survive Johnson killing it, the Freedman’s Savings Bank and the history surrounding that institution

Blah, blah, blah doesn’t work. What works is for the candidates to present their plans. They don’t appear to be in any hurry to do so. They will certainly let you down. By the time we’re down to 4 or 5, the subject will be dead and they will have moved on.

I’m having trouble reconciling this but it’s not terribly important.

I’m not talking about the girl who was raped, I’m talking about Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

Her ancestors are both the victim and rapists.

No one alive today was responsible for 1865. Your morality in trying to hold people responsible today for then is abhorrent.

Bad things happened. Tough poop. I don’t apologize for the past because I’ve got nothing to apologize for. I flatly oppose people that have beliefs that you have here expressed because those views are absolutely worthy of opposition.

As for slavery being an atrocity, if you’ve not seen it I guess then you aren’t even looking.

The Left certainly has no problem with taking the fruits of other people’s labor through the heavy hand of the government for the things they want to do, in particular for hand outs for individual welfare which is something that there is no delegated power given the federal to do and therefore is forbidden to the federal by the 10th Amendment.

(And no, Mr Roosevelt, passing a tax doesn’t legitimize the expenditure … just because you Tax doesn’t mean you can.)

And while we’re at it it is the Left that accepts and utilizes the exact same race construct – that the color of your skin says something ineffiable about who you are, can be and even should be – that the ooooold racist did … only now they do so to try to keep people on their respective little ideological reservations/plantations … keeping them in rather than keeping folks out as the old racists did.

So between eagerness to achieve political power through bread and circuses at the expense of the labors of others and the underlying ideas of race it certainly isn’t the right that resembles the old slave masters.

No one is stopping you from personally giving your every last dime to some descendant of a former slave if you wished to. Do that and leave the rest of us unmolested by your mad ideology.

I don’t owe a penny to anyone. Sorry, I just don’t.

You are neglecting two vital points.

Firstly, the internment of Japanese Americans in WW2 did in fact represent the United States violating the rights of those interned under the laws of the land as they existed at the time: such as the right to due process. That meant that those who were interned had a case.

Secondly those who were interned THEMSELVES brought that case to court, so they had Standing.

As I’ve pointed out, the Constitution forbids ex post facto laws. You cannot retroactively make something unlawful nor can you retroactively apply standards of decorum present today on those of the past to create an obligation that they should have obeyed them.

Which is just another way to say that we are not in arrears to former slaves.

But even if it could have been argued that we were somehow in arrears to them those who were slaves are all dead and no one alive today has Standing to bring their case to court,

Reparations for the long dead on account of things that were not crimes at the time violate numerable important legal principals on which our Constitution was based.

(Not that the Constitution means anything to the likes of those in the DNC.)

But reparations to the still living who presented their cases for violations of the Law that existed when those violations occurred uphold those principals.

Well, mine are not the clowns that are pressing this.

As for the relevance of the song, the Republicans puff out their chests every couple of years to talk about how great they’d be with a bit more power and they immediately turn around and act like their job is to get along with Democrats rather than do what they were elected to do … so as with the song: full disclosure they really aren’t that great…

… Quislings actually…

… but nevertheless the Democrats suck (or suck worse).

I guess the song would have worked as political commentary as “we suck, but you suck worse”.

Agreed they are different for the points you mentioned. My point was that reparations can occur MANY years later. And it can include the descendants as shown in Rosewood.