Yonkers Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) says it’s time for the feds to [dust off and again] create a $14-trillion reparations program for the descendants of enslaved Black people and other persons of African descent.

It’s time, Bowman said in a recent interview with David McKay Wilson of the Westchester Journal News, “to finally acknowledge the deep, lasting harms (plural) suffered by African Americans.”

To put the price in perspective, Wilson writes, the federal government in 2020 spent about $7 trillion, or roughly 28 percent of the nation’s then $25-trillion economy.

(That’s trillion, with a t, with one little trillion equaling a thousand billion dollars. Wrap your head around that.) So a $14-trillion reparations bill would amount to more than double, or 56 percent, of the sum-total of all goods and services bought and sold in the U.S. in 2020.

According to the same U.S. Census, writes Wilson, the 42 million African Americans then residing in the U.S. were about 12 percent of the population, meaning the program could deliver as much as $333,000 to each recipient, which Bowman suggests could be paid out over decades.

“It could be paid over 5 or 10 or 20 years,” he said. “You could break it into monthly checks over X amount of time. There are creative ways to do the right thing.”

For Bowman, the reparations discussion encompasses an even broader look at racial inequities across American society, writes Wilson, including housing, mass incarceration, higher education and wealth inequality.

Hudson Valley split on reparations
But there’s a split among Hudson Valley Democrats over differences between HR 414 and HR 40, Wilson reports.

Supporting 414 are Bowman and former Bedford Supervisor MaryAnn Carr, who’s challenging former Rep. Mondaire Jones for the Democrat nomination in the neighboring 17th District, now represented by incumbent Republican Congressman Mike Lawler.

Opposing 414 are Democrats Jones and Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who is looking to oust Democrat Bowman.

Latimer and Jones are instead backing HR 40, which calls for a reparations study commission plus an apology from the feds for 246 years of state-sanctioned slavery.

Meaning no immediate budgetary impact – get it?

“The issue of reparations deserves serious consideration and dialogue, which is why I support HR 40,” Latimer told the Journal News.

“But HR 414 is a one-house bill with no chance of passage, so it is clearly a political statement more than anything else.”

And while Jones opposes Bowman’s reparations bill, he too backs HR 40’s limited mission of an impact study.

Lawler, on the other hand, holds that it would be wrong to burden 21st century taxpayers with paying for [something} that was abolished in the 19th century.

“Congressman Lawler strongly opposes any law that would force today’s American taxpayers to pay reparations for [something] that ended 160 years ago – and nearly two hundred years ago in New York State,” Lawler campaign spokesman Chris Russell told Wilson.

“Aside from the $14-trillion dollar price tag requiring massive tax or debt increases, [Lawler] believes such a law would only lead to a greater racial divide and resentment at a time when we need to come together as a nation.”

…with which we at Wake Up, Westchester heartily not only agree but suggest the following items be added to the agenda for any such study group to ponder:

• What monetary charges can and should be levied and calculated as debits against the $14 trillion HR 414 fund, for the hardship costs of descendant widows and orphans of the 320,000 Union soldiers who invested in the fight against slavery and paid for it with their lives?
  

• What allowances if any can and should be made for the trillions (the ’t’ word again) of tax money collected and paid out over the past century and a half to slave descendants for local, state and federally funded health, education and welfare programs?

• Meanwhile, without holding our breath we’re looking forward to watching Democrats dance around an issue – taking money from one race and giving it to another for a crime neither committed nor suffered by either one whose time keeps coming and whose death is always exaggerated. ##