On this Juneteenth, the clumsiest named holiday on the calendar, it is fitting to address the controversial topic of reparations for black slavery.
First, let’s set out the context of the question. Slavery is the biggest blot on the American copybook. It was cruel, barbaric, and vicious. Though it was not practiced everywhere and by everyone in early America and is certainly not peculiar to this country, the debt owed needs to be addressed. But not by modern taxpayers who neither have owned slaves and whose ancestors may not have owned slaves as well.
Let’s also note that reparations have already been paid in the blood of over 300,000 Union soldiers who died to free slaves.
However, some debt is owed blacks because of the evil done to them by the Democrat Party. From slavery, to the Klan, to Jim Crow, to opposition to civil rights legislation, to the Great Society, to wokeism, the Dems have gone out of the way to injure black Americans and their families. Much of that has happened as official policy at the state and national level. An amends should be made. But not with one penny of taxpayer dollars.
Instead, because the harm has been cultural, intellectual, and economic, some black Americans, those who can prove they descended from slaves, should be given two decades of federal tax abatement and also be eligible for education vouchers to allow their children to attend the schools of their choice.
This not only punishes institutions that have done much harm to black Americans, the federal government and teachers unions, but it addresses the focal point of the problems.
At the hands of Dems, whose policies intentionally encouraged dependency amongst black residents of inner cities, blacks have suffered grievously. That dependency has taken the form of income redistribution that has crippled the work ethic of many. More direct payments in the form of reparations would only increase that dependency. However, a dramatic severing of ties to statism, by tax abatement in lieu of most current welfare programs, could unleash the dormant economic potential of many black Americans stuck in an economic paralysis of Dem making.
A further way out of the Dem socialist morass could be achieved by education vouchers that could be spent at schools of the private and parochial variety. Will these schools be perfect? Hardly. But they will likely be a good cut above the drug and violence infested inner city schools that, in places like Baltimore, are regularly graduating students who are victims of a system that fosters illiteracy, a system designed and perpetuated by Democrats.
Reparations cannot be a mere payoff. It must be a way to address past issues while improving the future. Only by breaking the shackles of state dependency and a failed education system can we realistically make a positive impact on black Americans and go a long way to atone for the evil of slavery.