What If We Give People Money?
A white guy stumbles through the topic of Reparations
There are times when I make a statement and then I realize that I am the “Master of the Obvious.” This is one of those times. Duh!
Because we live in a society where access to individual, ancestral, and family wealth means immunity from catastrophe and access to opportunity, then providing access to wealth is the surest way to improve the lives of people. Duh. Captain obvious here.
When the individual, ancestral, and family wealth of one group has been built through the genocide, enslavement, and segregation of other groups, then it makes sense to use some of that wealth to provide opportunities to build present-day wealth for the affected groups. Duh.
If I stole your bicycle, then when the police caught me, the very least I would have to do is give it back. But if my grandpa stole your grandpa’s bicycle, and then used that bicycle to start an enterprise that turned into a business empire that I currently enjoy, then returning just the dusty old bicycle might seem disingenuous. However, if I offered you the tools and support to build your own business empire, then maybe that might begin to repair the original crime.
That Reparations make sense is as obvious to me as the nose on my face — also meaning it is invisible until I look in the mirror.
I was listening to a podcast called The Weeds and in the episode called “Skipping the Broom,” at the 35th minute the host Jonquilyn Hill asked author Dianne Stewart about policies that might encourage marriage in the Black community.
Without skipping a beat, Stewart said “Reparations.” She said that wealth building was the single most important thing to do to strengthen Black families' resilience, which would put people in a good position to get married and stay married (if they wanted to).
Stewart went on to say that Reparations, while justified, are not politically viable right now.
It was a reality check that she could state the obvious and then move on from it. It is more than I would have done. I would not have seen the connection between marriage rates and Reparations in the first place.
From my position as a white male with a safety net (limited, but present), I like to think that I got that safety net through my own effort and merit. I worked summer jobs to pay for college. I paid off my student loans. I got jobs and fulfilled my obligations to my employers. I have contributed to my retirement account and to social security. I have been frugal and paid my credit card bills. Me. me. me. I did it.
So for people who look like me, who make up the majority of the electorate (for now), wealth might feel like something that individuals build or lose through their individual choices. Reparations might seem unnecessary in this view because if people lack wealth it is because they have not worked hard enough. We can’t see how ancestral and family wealth helped us because we think we did everything on our own. So Reparations seem like giving money from deserving to undeserving people and that makes it a non-starter politically.
Thus, even if Reparations are an obvious correction to inequality, the concept is politically dead. Since it is a non-starter, the idea becomes invisible.
Despite that reality, creating pathways to wealth for people might still be the best way to make a positive change.
Hill and Stewart discussed a proposal called “Baby Bonds” proposed by economist Darrick Hamilton, which would create a publicly funded trust fund for every child born in the United States. It would start when the child was born and be accessible later in life. The fund would be bigger or smaller based on family wealth. Poor kids would get a lot and rich kids a little, but everybody would get something. People could use the money to go to college, start a business, buy a house, or anything.
The Baby Bonds concept is designed to work for all Americans. Dianne Stewart seemed to be saying that policies that address wealth inequality across the board might be more palatable than Reparations and they might accomplish the same goals. She seemed to say that she would give up on the Reparations if wealth inequality were addressed for all people.
To get to the outcomes that Reparations would provide, would we need to disguise them as universal wealth-building policies? Would that provide a path to revolutionary solidarity across races?
I think first we would need to convince middle-aged white males like myself that our own wealth is not solely the result of individual effort.
That will be a hard sell, but not impossible.
I think get it.
There is wealth and security that I have that is the result of my own effort and other wealth that is an accident of my birth to a family with some economic security and with a gender and skin color favored by societal bias. Let’s call those two categories “deserved wealth” and “undeserved wealth.”
Deserved wealth is the result of me being a good student, a good employee, a frugal spender, a good investor, and avoiding risk and crippling addiction.
Undeserved wealth is inheritance, gifts from my family, and additional access I get to education, jobs, and investments due to my connections and identities. Some of that undeserved wealth is the result of ancestral wealth built on stolen land and the enslavement of people.
The ability to build deserved wealth is built on access to undeserved wealth. That is okay, but it must be acknowledged.
For example:
- My ability to be a good student was based on having a family that could keep me fed, housed, and secure enough to focus on my studies. I also needed access to good schools which could either come from living in a good school district or from private schools.
- My ability to go to college was based on not having to join the workforce to pay for family expenses, my access to loans, and my access to some money from my parents.
- My ability to be a good employee is partly based on my own confidence and the confidence of my employers that I can do a good job. That is partly based on societal bias. I can also dedicate my focus to my job because I have financial security in other areas of my life.
- My ability to be frugal and a good investor has been boosted by a couple of infusions of inheritance or gifts from family members. I also have been able to save because right out of college I was not expected to financially support any of my extended family.
- I have avoided risk and addiction because I did not need to take unnecessary risks and have avoided some of the traumas that might have led to addiction.
Okay, so each of my sources of so-called deserved wealth is intertwined with undeserved wealth. And some of that undeserved wealth links back to genocide and slavery.
And I come from what would objectively be called a lower-middle-class family. If I had had access to more family and ancestral wealth, I would probably be in an even better position financially.
In America, it is canon to say that the rich get richer and that wealth is protected by policies. Wealth is protected by making retirement savings protected from tax. It is protected by home mortgage tax deductions. It is protected by having low capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes. It is protected by having a tax system full of loopholes for rich people. It is protected by laws that favor landlords and employers.
Conversely, there is a “tax” on not having wealth. It is often more expensive to own an older used car because it keeps breaking down. Likewise, renting is more expensive than owning a house and no equity is built. Tax policies mean that wage earners end up paying higher rates of taxes than wealthy people. If a person does not have a reliable car or a place to store food, then their food options are limited to expensive “convenience” food. Health and dental preventative care that gets delayed can lead to catastrophic expenses and debts. If a person needs to work instead of going to college, then a lifetime of potential increased earnings is lost. When needs are financed through loans and credit cards, much of the potential wealth is siphoned off to give banks interest and fees. And when a whole extended family lacks access to wealth, that puts a drag on the family members who do have some resources, preventing the accumulation of wealth for them.
I would not propose that people should be stripped of all undeserved wealth. No. Instead, I propose that those without access to undeserved wealth be given that access through policies that favor the building of wealth. I would use wealth taxes to pay for those policies.
Baby Bonds are just one such policy of wealth support. Economists have come up with dozens more if we could see our way to supporting them.
In fact, if we wanted to, then we could design policies that made wealth access less necessary for safety and security. We could have policies that promoted free higher education and universal good schools (not just for rich neighborhoods), living wages for everybody, affordable housing and child care, reliable accessible public transportation, publicly funded health and dental care, public parks and spaces for recreation, and guaranteed retirement income. Thus, access to wealth would not be such a factor in individual success. It would lower the bar.
The fact that these policies to build wealth and financial security might benefit all people is what Heather McGhee describes in her book The Sum of Us as defying the logic of drained pools. She talks about how America turned away from such policies when Civil Rights laws caused them to be available to Black people. Her example is how when desegregation was legislated, some white leaders decided to defund public schools and fill in public pools rather than allow a mixing of races in quality parks and schools.
We cut off our noses to spite our faces.
Since when America turned away from policies that help poor, working-class, and middle-class people gain access to wealth, we have seen a dramatic increase in wealth inequality and all of the problems associated with that. And that is not just for Black people.
So it is clearly time to go back to policies that help all people build wealth.
This gets us to the real problem of Reparations or any wealth distribution.
American capitalism, as it currently functions, depends on the economic insecurity of the working class.
The “middle class” is a meaningless distinction, designed to divide people. If you make your money through owning land, businesses, or houses, then you are owning class. If you need to work for a living, then you are working class.
The owning class requires the labor of the working class to make them money. The rich don’t just get richer by magic. They do it on the backs of the working class. And working-class people would not tolerate it unless we had no other choice.
Therefore we get policies that keep working-class people economically insecure. We get low minimum wages, a car-based transportation system, employer-based health insurance and retirement plans, tax policies that favor the owning class, public schools funded by property taxes, inaccessible higher education, rental policies that favor landlords, immigration policies that create a permanent underclass that can be exploited, mass incarceration, and environmental policies that mean life-threatening pollution affects poor communities first.
None of these policies are glitches in the system. These are features.
Economic insecurity is a finely tuned feature of the system. For it to work, it requires a few people to be sacrificed by throwing them off a financial cliff. The system needs unhoused people and untreated crack addicts to scare the rest of us. The system also needs the majority of working-class people to be just on the edge of the financial cliff, but not falling off. The working class needs to be reminded that the cliff is not far away. That is what keeps us at low-wage jobs or taking on crushing debt to go to school or any of the things we do. The alternative is catastrophic.
Society can’t function if too many people are in catastrophic failure. We need just enough to scare the rest of us into staying on the treadmill to keep making the rich richer. We also need racism, sexism, and xenophobia, to justify the inequality.
When COVID hit, the policymakers sensed that a wrench was being thrown into the gears of the finely tuned capitalist machine. They extended unemployment benefits, gave increased funds for child care, made direct payments to people, gave out PPP loans, suspended student loan payments, enforced eviction moratoriums, and more. It kept most of us from falling off the cliff. It was a vision of a world where wealth inequalities were addressed by policies. It could not last.
By now, all those policies have expired and we are back to the cliff edge.
Personally, I think that we can have economic prosperity for everyone without having to keep whole groups of people in poverty or fear of poverty.
It is a false vision of human nature to assume that the only way to get people to work is to put them on the edge of a cliff. Meaningful work that contributes to society is our birthright and humans thrive when we are given a chance to be engaged in and aware of society’s needs. As Paul Wellstone said: “We all do better when we all do better.”
It is only fear that keeps the current system in place.
If we had real Reparations, that would piss off a lot of rich people who would see many potential workers who would be less easy to exploit as low-wage workers or powerless tenants. It would also piss off a lot of working-class people who are not descendants of enslaved people because they would still be left on the cliff edge. They would blame the recipients of the Reparations and not the architects and beneficiaries of a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the owning class.
So I propose we address wealth inequality for all Americans. Just that.
Yikes! I am aware that I have just advocated extended Reparations to white people and in doing so, it makes the concept meaningless. As a white guy, it might seem like I am saying “All lives matter!” And denying the specific and harmful legacy of slavery and segregation. I might come off as Bernie Bro (or worse) saying that class trumps race. Not my intention, but…
I don’t know what to say. This is a tactic. I don’t mean to imply a false equivalency between harms done to various groups. If we could make Reparations (and Land Back!) happen politically, then I would say let’s do that first. But if we can build a coalition based on solidarity then I believe it is worth expanding the concept of Reparations.
Every person who is without wealth has ancestors and family who have somehow been denied access to wealth.
Yes. People make bad choices. All people make bad choices, but those bad choices usually only result in extreme poverty for working-class people. If you are one bad choice away from catastrophe, then you are too close to the edge of the cliff, and a little wealth could give you the support you need to go back to making good choices.
