Following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent calls for American society to have a “racial reckoning,” there has been an uptick in support for reparations for Black Americans, but a new think tank report estimates it would cost taxpayers an estimated $15 trillion to close the Black-White wealth gap.
As cities across the country debate whether reparations are justified, Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman examined who would likely be responsible for paying reparations, if they truly serve as a form of compensation for past injustices.
He concluded in his report that the only plausible party from whom you can get the money for reparations is the American government and by extension, American taxpayers. He argues a key problem of such an argument is that many Americans are not descended from ancestors who were in the U.S. prior to abolition.
“That logic becomes much harder to sustain when you have large groups of recent immigrants who are very obviously not implicated in historical injustice and who are also themselves often systematically disadvantaged,” he said. “Asking those people to take responsibility for injustices 150 years ago is not something they are necessarily willing to swallow.”
SAN FRANCISCO’S PROPOSED REPARATIONS PLAN COULD COST CITY $100 BILLION: REPORT
A crowd listens to speakers at a reparations rally outside of City Hall in San Francisco, on March 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
Because many Americans did not have ancestors living in the U.S. in the slavery era, Lehman believes it is unjust to ask descendants of post-Civil War immigrants to foot the reparations bill and “with each passing year, immigration further shrinks the population share plausibly eligible to pay a debt for slavery,” he wrote.
“Many Americans today are descended from people who arrived after 1865,” he told Fox News Digital. “This is most obviously true in the case of Asian and Hispanic Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom came to the…
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