Update: MLK agrees with me. I obviously had no idea or that would have been the core of my argument.
Update: Just imagine what a UBI would do in this context:
http://www.thenation.com/article/new-jim-crow/
Original Essay: On the subject of reparations, I have something to say that I haven’t heard anyone else say.
Context.
1. Assume that people of color are oppressed to this day because of the damage done by slavery.
2. Assume the point of reparations is to address that early damage.
3. Assume that others profited and continue to profit unfairly from that oppression.
Ok. So, you want to address this in an economic way that’s fair and viable and ethical.
I think a progressive tax and a UBI (unconditional basic income) accomplishes that goal. And it has the added bonus of not being by definition racist in the way that affirmative actions are. This seems counter intuitive but here follow along for a second. After all if it’s not a special effort made in favor of a specific race how can it qualify as reparations? In the same way that a given policy can disproportionately impact a given race without having to expressly specify a race anywhere within it. The same way a flat tax disproportionately hurts the poor despite being by definition totally even mathematically.
A UBI provided baseline income would have diminishing improvement effect as you climb the economic ladder. Hedge fund guys are not even going to notice the tiny bump in income their UBI check would provide, thus the fairness price paid in letting rich white guys collect the same reparations check as descendants of slaves, is offset by the fact that by the very virtue of being rich, there is no effective improvement to their lives.
Also it will be offset by the fact that on balance they’ll be paying way more then they are getting expressly because they are overly wealthy.
This means a UBI by definition is a smart bomb for poverty. It self selects and self adjusts its impact by the very metric we all agree on is the metric of most relevance: degree of poverty.
A UBI check to a homeless man is literally life changing. So to of anyone else economically crushed for any reason, including damage done by systemic racism of the present or the past. The more damage done, the more a UBI will help. Automatically and instantly the people most aided are those most currently crushed. And as they rise, the help done diminishes until they reach a point of economic sufficiency where they begin paying into the system instead of extracting from it.
The more oppressed a group actually is, the more the UBI helps them over others who don’t need it. No bureaucracy required. No debate over who gets what is needed. No one decides.
The only debate is how much to give, and at what rate to tax. That’s all. Two figures.
The other end of the spectrum is the progressive tax to pay for it. In this context a progressive tax is as much a smart bomb as the UBI is. It has the opposite effect as you go up the economic ladder. The more advantage you are granted for any reason up to and including profits from systemic racism, past or present, the more the progressive tax will take from you, and the more you can afford to have taken from you without impacting your actual quality of life.
See here for my primary post about the UBI:
Inspired by this video:
Interesting. I just got done writing up the following over the last hour or so, before I stumbled across this post of yours:
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I think it’s understandable that African Americans want some sort of “reparations” from the United States. Even today they are, as a group, economically and socially disadvantaged by current social structures. And it has been, famously, much worse in the past.
I count myself as one who is in principle in favor of some kind of reparation, but my mind threatens to explode when I start to think about how to go about figuring out who benefits, how much, which specific wrongs are being addressed, how far back you go, who pays, how serious a wrong has to be before you litigate like this (since it would set a precedent), and so forth.
So, in the interest of simplifying the matter some, I want to offer an observation or two.
First, it seems reasonable to suggest that, to a first approximation, the gap between black wealth and income, on the one hand, and white wealth and income, on the other, is a good starting point for determining the total amount of reparation owed.
Average African American income and wealth lags average white income and wealth by quite a bit. If these gaps are due mostly to past and current systemic injustice, it seems only right to make things square, so that we can at least remove the economic disadvantage that resulted from past injustice, and enable African Americans to participate in the economy just as fully as whites going forward.
Second, any general transfer of wealth from the top 1% to the bottom 80% would, as an indirect byproduct, involve a net transfer from white to black, for the simple reason that African Americans are vastly under-represented in the top 1% and vastly over-represented in the bottom 80%.
So, the suggestion is that general attempts to reduce the extreme inequality we have in the United States today could also be framed as a partial indirect reparation program.
There are some reasons this indirect method of partial reparation might be deemed insufficient. It comes with no explicit recognition of wrong for specific kinds of injustice. And it is not being targeted on the basis of race. Poor whites would benefit as much as poor blacks. And rich blacks would not benefit at all. All that can be said is that “on average” there will be a net transfer from white to black.
But if part of the point is to help African Americans as a group climb out of the hole the United States has put them in, then reducing inequality would go some way toward that goal.
There is another reason a “one-time” transfer would be insufficient. If systemic injustice remains, we could conceivably make whites and blacks square with each other, and then see divergence in the future, because the system is still rigged in favor of whites and against blacks.
I wonder if that’s why Martin Luther King’s prefered vehicle for delivering economic justice to everyone was a Universal Basic Income. That vehicle not only transfers wealth from the top to the bottom, but it does so on an ongoing basis. As such it is a means of continual partial indirect reparation.
So the suggestion is that perhaps a Universal Basic Income, plus continued effort in trying to un-rig the system might be a fairly simple way to move toward justice.
Thoughts?
Well that might just be the most substantive comment I’ve ever gotten on my blog.
I was unaware that Martin Luther King preferred a Universal Basic Income! That ends the debate right there in my favor as far as I’m concerned. How did I not stumble across that? Thank you 🙂
I think the apology and admission of wrong doing is implicit in our policy choices and legislative reversals, but still I’m happy to stipulate any ancestral wrong doing for which I am still responsible to whatever degree and make my sincere apology for being white or whatever I’m accused of having done if it means advancing the UBI cause.
I think a UBI is a silver bullet to much of society’s ills in the same way that single payer is a silver bullet to much of healthcare’s ills.
I mean seriously, it’s hard to imagine a social problem a UBI wouldn’t help to some degree.
I completely agree that a one time payment isn’t going to cut it. That could do more harm that good in the long run even if you ignore the cost of the payment itself.
And as I argue above a partial reparation is the only possible type anyway because nothing can truly make up for what was done. At which point the objective is to choose the best partial solution, of which a UBI is chief among them. And apparently MLK agrees with us. Which again just ends the debate phase of the discussion for me, truly.