I caught this brief blurb about reparations and it got me to thinking. The concept is that people who were slaves for a period of 89 years when it was legal in the United States did not get paid and therefore got no benefit for their labor to carry forward. Wouldn’t that include subsistence farmers, small businesses, and laborers who made a living, but did not build wealth? People who owned slaves were able to maintain and expand their land holdings, diversify their investments so that their modern day wealth is based in part from the free labor obtained from the slaves. The trick is to determine a value of that labor carried forward to today. Michael Eric Dyson-calls-for all white Americans to have a reparations account to repay black Americans.

The latest estimate I saw says that that value is somewhere between 5.9 trillion and 14.2 trillion in today’s dollars.

I have been paying income taxes since 1969. That means that I got no benefit for a portion of my labor every year right up until present. Part of my tax burden was paying for LBJ’s Great Society.  The cost of the Great Society carried over to 2015 is estimated to be 19 trillion in today’s dollars. I’d say we’re square.

Let’s call it even and roll back the percentage of the budget devoted to welfare spending to 1965 levels. That would be 30% or 10 trillion dollars. With 10 trillion circulating around the economy, there’s no telling what could get done.