Caribbean Times 5th Issue - Friday 30th September 2016

8 c a r i b b e a n t i m e s . a g
Friday 30th September 2016
Cost of slavery reparations now within the
boundaries of the politically acceptable
A U.N. panel has declared the United
States owes reparations to African
Americans, as compensation for “the
legacy of colonial history, enslavement,
racial subordination and segregation,
racial terrorism and racial inequality.”
The panel’s recommendations,
which were presented on Monday, in
no way require the U.S. government
to make payments and will likely have
no practical effects — but they could
occasion a new national debate about
what the country owes its black citizens.
In the past, proponents of reparations
have been stymied by a range of
practical and conceptual objections.
For the past year, however, American
voters have been listening to prominent
presidential candidates talk about all
kinds of outrageously expensive proposals.
By comparison, proposals for
reparations for slavery look downright
modest, at least in terms of cost.
A researcher at the University of
Connecticut recently published a new
estimate of the value of U.S. slave labor
in the 89 years from the country’s
founding until the end of the Civil War.
Based on the wages paid to laborers in
the antebellum period and assuming an
average of 12 hours of work a day, seven
days a week, the researcher, Thomas
Craemer, concluded that U.S. slave labor
would be worth roughly $5.9 trillion
today.
That is equal to the 10-year cost of
Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump’s most recent tax plan, and
it is significantly less than the price
tag on former Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders’s health-care
plan.
Craemer ignored colonial history
before U.S. independence, when the
U.K. government would arguably have
been liable. He also did not calculate
the costs of thefts and lynchings after
the war and excluded more modern
forms of discrimination, focusing instead
on forced labor, an easily defined
and indisputable example of economic
injury.
Paying reparations “doesn’t bring
anybody back that’s dead. It doesn’t begin
to repair for the damages incurred,”
Craemer said. “At least it is a symbolic
gesture that is more meaningful than
just saying, ‘Sorry.’ “
His personal interest in the problem
of reparations results from his childhood
in Germany. The German government
has been paying reparations
to victims of the Nazi regime for more
than 60 years. Craemer did not know
about the payments until he learned
about them from a widow of a friend
who had survived the Holocaust.
Incidentally, an independent analysis
by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation
estimated Trump’s proposed tax plan
could cost the government as much as
$5.9 trillion in foregone revenue over a
decade. That figure does not take into
account the effects of tax relief on the
broader economy. An increase in the
overall size of the economy because of
reduced taxes could limit the costs to
between $2.6 trillion and $3.9 trillion
over 10 years, according to the foundation.
On the other hand, those economic
benefits are uncertain — and a year
ago, Trump proposed an even more
exorbitant plan that would have cost
as much as $9.5 trillion, according to
the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Sixty-seven
percent of the benefits would
have accrued to the wealthiest one in
five households.
While Trump’s revised plan is less
expensive, he campaigned on the original
plan for nearly a year. It was his
official position when the Republican
Party nominated him. The GOP primary
contest demonstrated that voters
will seriously entertain policies that are
vastly more expensive than the cost of
compensating slaves’ descendants for
their unpaid labor.
On the left, Sanders proposed a
health-care plan that would have cost
the government no less than $32 trillion
over a decade, by the Tax Policy
Center’s estimate.
During the campaign, Sanders said
he was opposed to reparations.
“Sanders says the chance of getting
reparations through Congress is ‘nil,’
a correct observation which could just
as well apply to much of the Vermont
senator’s own platform,” Ta-Nehisi
Coates, who has argued forcefully for
reparations, wrote in The Atlantic.
Indeed, compared with Trump’s
tax plans and Sanders’s health-care
plan, compensating the descendants of
slaves for their ancestors’ forced labor
would be a modest expense — especially
considering that these estimates
for Trump’s and Sanders’s proposals
are only for the first 10 years, and the
costs would continue to accumulate
year after year.
In the second decade under Trump’s
tax plan, for example, the foregone
revenue would exceed $15 trillion, according
to the Tax Policy Center.
To be sure, Craemer’s estimate,
based on an average of 12 hours a day
of wages for 89 years of slave labor in
the United States, only accounts for a
portion of the reparations that could
conceivably by claimed by African
cont’d on pg 9