Reparations for slavery and the systematic ghettoization of Black Americans are not a gift — they are a debt. The question is not whether to pay it, but how to calculate it fairly and deliver it efficiently.
This post proposes a specific mechanism: a DNA-ancestry-based tax credit, calibrated using the Rule of 72, sized to close the documented 7:1 racial wealth gap in three generations. It would cost less than the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
America needs to forgive itself for its original sins of slavery and ghettoization of Native Americans. To claim that was a different time and a different set of people is disingenuous. The government aided and abetted these travesties and they need to help alleviate them. So the question is how to do this fairly?
Here’s a simple proposal. First we must make some observations: with DNA tracking, we know exactly who your ancestors were. With DNA ancestry records — increasingly available through commercial testing — we can establish proportional ancestry and scale the benefit accordingly, without requiring case-by-case documentation of historical harm. Your ancestors were either discriminated against or not. And we know the proportions, so we can base the reparations on a standard legal ground. The idea is to take each grouping of families and compare their wealth to the average. We can figure out what the growth rate would need to be to match the wealth of the groups at any time in the future. Pick a time frame to eliminate this systemic racism. Maybe as long as it was in place? About 350 years? So say we plan to be an egalitarian society at that point? That seems ridiculous! How about reversing the last 55 years of streaky relative decline since the Voting Rights Act was passed? That was almost 3 generations ago, about time to fix it.
What additional revenue would this group need to match wealth in a few centuries? Today’s ratio of wealth white to black is about 7 to 1. [1] So we need approximately 3 doublings to fix this. (2³ = 8, so three doublings eliminates a 7:1 gap) So to fix it in three generations we have to double it every 20 years. This would mean an extra 3.5% income every year. (By the Rule of 72, doubling every 20 years requires a 3.5% annual growth premium. We can fade it out over the three generations, so start with double that amount and fade it to zero of a half century. How do we get this income to the right people? Tax credits. Give the reparations to the needy as a 7% tax credit, a form of Universal Basic Income for all those who were discriminated against. We can afford it. It would end up costing us less than the Republican’s latest tax scam for the rich. And it would go a far way towards making income inequality disappear.
The underlying math — the Rule of 72 and doubling-time calculations — is explained in detail in: Hacks of System Engineering to Understand Exponential Growth (2021).
This is intentionally brief. The full calculation is left to the reader as an exercise. Note this fixes income not wealth. It would only be a down payment on the reparations.
thanks for reading,
-Dr. Mike
For the ethical framework underlying this proposal — that the Declaration's promise of equality creates a positive obligation to remedy systematic inequality — see: The Declaration of Independence as the Foundation of Modern Ethics (2017).
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[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_inequality_in_the_United_States#Racial_wealth_gap
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