Thursday, October 16, 2014

How Reparations Could Happen!

Ebony Magazine ^ | September 23, 2014 | Hamilton Nolan 

Reparations will amount to a transfer of wealth from the more powerful to the more powerless. This is the closest approximation of justice that I would imagine is possible.

We will now engage in some purposely simplified back-of-the-envelope math. Imagine a nationwide, one-time infusion of wealth to those who live at the lower end of America's economic pyramid. Let's take as our starting point that Black households have roughly 60% of the income and 5% of the wealth that White households do. (Hispanic households have just a tiny bit more wealth than Black households. Median household net worth is about $81,000. Average household net worth, which is swelled by the fortunes at the top, is $535,000.) For the sake of argument, let's be exceedingly modest in our goals: let's imagine giving an amount of money that would give the average Black household at least more than half of the wealth of the average White household. We can calculate this very neatly: if Black households have 5% of White net worth now, let's add 50% to that, giving the average Black household 55% the net worth of the average White household, which is something north of $110,000. Sticking with our neat, clean, and modest estimate here, let's round half of that down to $50,000.
Fifty thousand dollars per household. This would be enough in theory to raise the average Black household to at least half of what the average White household has in wealth....
(Excerpt) Read more at ebony.com ...

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