LogFAQs > #974566498

Ozmose posted...

That's not really a good analogy for reparations. An overwhelming amount of white people in this country were poor working class individuals. Why should their descendants need to pay? Hell, my family wasn't even living here at the time. What entities anyone to my money?

I'm all for tracing the slave money to make sure reparations are paid specifically by people that profited from slavery instead of taking a shotgun approach, but at this point, there's a pretty good chance that everyone in the US with enough money to contribute meaningfully to a reparations fund has received slavery-based money at some point in their careers. It's not a guarantee, but it's probable enough to skip the considerable amount of legwork required to trace the money conclusively.

Now, that said, I'm generally not huge on reparations as a concept. As a concept, they focus more on what people "deserve" or "are owed," which are largely useless considerations. Instead, programs like that should be framed as general social welfare programs, focused on results: If a group is poor as a result of certain social institutions, fix those institutions and shore up whatever deficiencies are making them poor. No questions of entitlements, just "here's a problem, let's solve it using general tax dollars."