You may be too young to know that the civil unrest going on right now was extraordinarily similar days leading up to the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1968.
We need serious people to solve these serious problems.
But one of those solutions is not what BET Founder Robert Johnson demanded, which is for government to hand over this eye-popping amount for slavery reparations.
You can probably expect some sort of careful deliberations over how to put this madness to end in the coming weeks because Antifa and members of the Black Lives Matter movement probably won’t stop until they do.
We all need to come together and present serious solutions before it destroys our great country.
But the United States government paying $14 trillion to millions of black Americans for slavery reparations is not one of them.
That’s what Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert Johnson just suggested on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week insisting “now is the time to go big.”
$14 trillion is a “go big or go home” number.
Johnson added, “Wealth transfer is what’s needed. Think about this. Since 200-plus-years or so of slavery, labor taken with no compensation, is a wealth transfer. Denial of access to education, which is a primary driver of accumulation of income and wealth, is a wealth transfer.”
One thing Johnson is alarmingly ignoring here is that Africans sold their African brothers and sisters into slavery. So when Johnson insists it’s a “wealth of transfer to white Americans away from African Americans” because “damages are owed” to black Americans, it’s important to note the full scope here.
Johnson, himself, is a billionaire media mogul but didn’t have a great reason how he arrived at $14 trillion.
In an op-ed he penned recently, Johnson noted; “People ask how I arrived at that number, and I’ll admit that it’s mostly math with some justifiable assumptions. Basically, the goal of the $14 trillion is to close the wealth gap.”
Johnson explained how he arrived at that number by saying: “The math goes like this: A typical African American’s net worth is $17,000, while the typical white American’s worth is $170,000, which is a tenfold gap. You want to close the aforementioned gap in homeownership — 40 percent vs. 70 percent. You also have to factor in the income gap (about 25 percent) the cost of education, the differences in savings and investment. To close all those gaps with payment over 30 years, it’s going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $357,000 per African American citizen. Multiply that by the 40 million individuals whose ancestors were enslaved, and you arrive at around $14 trillion.”
Those are some extraordinary numbers.
He also actually insisted it be paid in cash, “I’m talking about cash. We are a society based on wealth. That’s the foundation of capitalism.”
Right now, there is only $1.5 trillion inequality in the U.S. economy, on top of the massive debt. Just so it’s clear, there is only $36.8 trillion in total cash across every global currency in the world.
So basically, Johnson’s reparations plan would require taking nearly half of all the world’s cash for the 40 million black Americans.
To add fuel to the fire, the United States government is still figuring out how to cover the rampant costs of the Chinese coronavirus ravaging our nation and the destruction caused by these Antifa riots and now they’re supposed to find money for this too? We simply don’t have it.
