What do you think about the idea of San Francisco giving reparations to eligible residents?
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jca2 (
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March 19th, 2023
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Seems fine to me. This countries disgusting practices directly lead to situations some black Americans face, after all.
If we can give money to farmers and bankers and other rich people then I don’t see the issue.
Who says who is eligible? What criteria will be used? Where does the money come from? Who came up with such a ridiculous number? Where is the data and/or process that they used to come up with that number?
So many profound, unanswered questions.
Of course, this is a horrible idea
In a city that never saw slavery, tax residents who were never slave owners tens of thousands of dollars to give to people who were never slaves. Makes total sense to me. It’s not like tax rates aren’t high anyway.
@Caravanfan
We are aware there was a mass migration of african Americans after slavery, correct?
Would you continue to live in the south after all that occurred?
I don’t think reparations is about individuals. My family came to the states 100+ years after slavery ended. But I’d have no issues paying reparations. Because we still live in and benefit from a system that is historically racist.
That said, I also don’t think reparations to individuals is the answer either. I’d much rather pay higher taxes to go towards programs to bridge the equity gap for the Black community.
@Blackberry Not sure of your point, but I’ll bite.
1) Yes
2) I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t live anywhere besides California.
I’m against this idea. I would be all for it if it directly benefited the people that were affected. This many years later, no. Treat the people NOW much better than they were then (in fact, treat them as you want to be treated) and move forward with life. My family, as I’m sure many, were treated certain ways because of certain conditions, I’m not looking for reparations because of it.
IMHO, reparations is a bad idea for two main reasons.
1) I don’t think it will actually fix anything. We’ve seen over and over that when people come into windfall cash like athletes and lotto winners, they seldom manage the money well. I fear this would be even more wasteful and might encourage people to quit their jobs and do other rash things that will actually leave them worse off in the long run.
2) I think it’s a distraction from the things we should REALLY be doing to help close the racial divide which is improving the living conditions in the city, most substantially education and law enforcement. Those are deep topics and I won’t rant about them here, but fixing ‘the system’ for future blacks is more important than the feel-good dumping of cash on their head which will lead to alot of people thinking ‘Okay, we’re good now, right?’ when in fact, the real problems all still exist.
Reparations is a thing most often proposed by politicians who are in trouble and looking for cheap votes. Someone pithier than I once remarked something to the effect of “Robbing Peter to pay Paul will always secure Paul’s vote.”
@Entropy And cause Peter to flee for friendler territory.
I’m getting tired of all the Peter’s showing up here where I live. They have wrecked my hometown and made it unaffordable for younger locals.
We are not responsible for the sins of our fathers.
Pretty standard Lefty fare. To look back and hold people 6 or 7 generations removed from something you now see as a wrong done is foolishness. I mean where does it stop? Let’s just stick to slavery as a perfect example. Most black slaves that arrived in what is now the USA were sold to European slavers by other black people. There were a number of tribes that were well known to attack and enslave their neighbors and they realized how to make money by selling their slaves. So maybe some of the African nations should be made to pay some of the reparations. But hey, that won’t work. So let’s look at the Slavers. The Dutch were by far the biggest slavers working those days. So maybe The Netherlands should be made to pay. Spain was on their heels, Britain was up there, and the USA was way down the line. So maybe these other nations should be paying the lion’s share. Many of the blacks were taken to the West Indies as a stopping point and sold there. Britain, Spain, and the Dutch owned all these ports, after they had conquered and enslaved the locals. Huh, we are back to these three. And then many of the blacks were taken to what is now the USA. Remember that at the time slavery was widely accepted in the world so while it is outrageous, it was an accepted practice in the day. It should also be noted that the Irish were the first slaves to arrive in the New World. So maybe Reparations should be paid to anyone of Irish heritage. But the US was one of the first nations to outlaw slavery and, as far as I know, the only one to actually fight a Civil War to make sure it ended. So there were about half the people in the nation at the time that didn’t like slavery and wanted to end it, even though it was popular in the rest of the world except possibly in England at the time. So now the division starts to show its face. There were 3776 black slave owners in America during those times. So are we suggesting that the descendants of black slave owners should be paid reparations? And then we have all the white people that fought for the North during the Civil War. Lives were lost, families were hurt, livelihoods were lost. Should their ancestors be paid reparations by Black people for helping to free the slaves? Maybe we should look at who fought to keep slavery and then who fought for another century to keep Blacks subservient. That was the Democrats. All the statues that celebrated Confederate soldier and officers…they were all of Democrats. So maybe the Democrats should pay any reparations to blacks, eh?
Tell the whole story @Wulfie..
Slavery and the emergence of the bipartisan system
From 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won all but two presidential elections (1840 and 1848). During the 1840s and ’50s, however, the Democratic Party, as it officially named itself in 1844, suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. The 1860 election also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly established (1854) antislavery Republican Party (which was unrelated to Jefferson’s Republican Party of decades earlier). With the Democrats hopelessly split, Lincoln was elected president with only about 40 percent of the national vote; in contrast, Douglas and Breckinridge won 29 percent and 18 percent of the vote, respectively.
The election of 1860 is regarded by most political observers as the first of the country’s three “critical” elections—contests that produced sharp yet enduring changes in party loyalties across the country. (Some scholars also identify the 1824 election as a critical election.) It established the Democratic and Republican parties as the major parties in what was ostensibly a two-party system. In federal elections from the 1870s to the 1890s, the parties were in rough balance—except in the South, where the Democrats dominated because most whites blamed the Republican Party for both the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Reconstruction (1865–77) that followed; the two parties controlled Congress for almost equal periods through the rest of the 19th century, though the Democratic Party held the presidency only during the two terms of Grover Cleveland (1885–89 and 1893–97). Repressive legislation and physical intimidation designed to prevent newly enfranchised African Americans from voting—despite passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—ensured that the South would remain staunchly Democratic for nearly a century (see black code). During Cleveland’s second term, however, the United States sank into an economic depression. The party at this time was basically conservative and agrarian-oriented, opposing the interests of big business (especially protective tariffs) and favouring cheap-money policies, which were aimed at maintaining low interest rates.
I hate when someone tells just enough to support their side of a story.
^^^ YES ^^^ YES ^^^ YES ^^^^
@Dig_Dug And…what does that have to do with Slavery and Reparations? My point was to show how silly the idea of reparations is. As for my tying it to Democrats, do you deny that the CSA was Democrats? You do not because you just admitted it. Are you trying to say that Democrats later continued to suppress blacks? No, you admitted to that too. No, you are trying to deflect.
No @seawulf575 I’m saying there were Southern Democrats and there were Northern Democrats. The party’s changed over the years, did you not see that? There was also antislavery Republicans and Jefferson’s Republicans.
@Entropy
Just a reminder that the Pentagon lost approximately 220 billion dollars…..they don’t know where it went.
Then you have all of the majority caucasian people that have wasted their parents money, have embezzled, white collar crime etc.
I can go on if you’d like….
Those athletes also have their money stolen from them by their white accountants and money managers as well.
Disregarding the fact that these reparations are guaranteed to not even happen….you should be more concerned about the lives that will be changed forever positively by all the responsible black americans out there.
If a white kid from a well off family can rape a woman outside behind a dumpster, or kill 4 people in a DUI…then a black person can get a chance to buy a home and change their life to build and pass their wealth on, which is one of the ways the white middle class was built up in the past.
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