Having had so much success with the Green New Deal's plausibility, two of the Democratic candidates for President -- both of whom endorsed the GND -- have decided that they'd like to endorse another big program,
reparations for slavery, too.
I'm not in principle opposed to the idea. In
principle, in fact, I think it is plausible. This sort of payment-for-injury-suffered-by-relatives exists in several traditions, including our own: the
wergild of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, the
diyya of the Arabs (still in use today in some places). The basic approach is well known and works. We would need to do two things:
1) Determine a fair price for inflicting slavery on someone;
2) Agree that, in return for the paying of that price, we would reconcile completely and never return to the issue again. Compensation is complete and the matter is settled; the agreement is that no more compensation will ever be due.
In principle we could do that here, too. Say we decided that a fit price for stealing a man's life via slavery was a million current-day US dollars. That's a non-extravagant figure that a court might award in a wrongful death lawsuit against a corporation, and it's an amount of money that a hard-working individual might earn in his or her lifetime with careful investment. So, we assign a million dollars to
each and every person who was a slave in the USA; that number grew from 400,000 to 4.4 million over several decades, so we figure 4.4M + 2.2M. + 1.1M + 400,000 = 8.1 million total slaves. At a million dollars each, $8,100,000,000,000 (8.1 trillion dollars).
Heck, that's cheaper than the GND by far. So far, so good.
Of course, you've got to divide that money among all the descendants of all of those people. And if you're related to two of them -- or, across generations, to six or eight of them -- then you should get a part of the payment for each of them. My guess is that no records exist that would make that possible to calculate reliably.
Now, assuming that all black Americans have at least one slave ancestor, and that no other Americans do, the payout would come to $170,000 per person. (If you had two or more, more.) America could pay this off on a rolling basis, too, rather than as a lump sum; if we used actuarial tables to contribute life expectancy, and divided your payoffs by your expected lifespan, some people would need to be paid in 5 years but some could be paid over 50.
Again, compared to the GND, this is relatively cheap. Heck, it's cheap compared to Medicare for All, which is $3.2 Trillion
every year. In three years it would cost more than this one time payout. So, in principle, it might make sense.
I think there are practical details that would make a program like this very difficult to get everyone to agree to, however. Many Americans' ancestors weren't even here when slavery was a thing; they will object to paying the taxes to fund this reparations payment for something their ancestors had no part of. No living Americans own slaves, and they might object to being forced to pay for someone else's wrongdoing. And on the other side, too, even a large payment may not allow people to accept that the debt is really settled. Plus, there's another issue: Say that you've got five people in your family, but the week after the payments begin to go out, one of them gets pregnant. Each of you gets $170,000, but the child gets nothing just by virtue of being born a little too late. Over time, that's going to create a bulge of resentful young people who got left out of the payments by accident of fate.
Also, it won't turn out to be the case that -- per assumption -- no non-black Americans have slave ancestors (nor that all black Americans do -- look at Barack Obama). There's no way of resolving that without causing problems.
Very often the practicalities are what kill things, and I don't think this one is going anywhere. But I can see a case for it. Maybe somebody else will come up with a model that might work.
UPDATE: Warren complicates the plan substantially when she says it should
cover Native Americans, too. That's much harder to do on a
wergild basis because the issue isn't the deaths
per se, it's the elimination of whole civilizations and ways of life.
