The hot-button issue of slavery reparations got a major boost April 13 when students at Georgetown University voted in favor of a special fee that would benefit the descendants of 272 African slaves once owned by the Catholic university, located in Washington, DC.

The vote fanned the flames of an escalating political debate over whether the U.S. government should pay monetary compensation for the past sins of slavery and racial discrimination.

The nonbinding student referendum, which must be approved by the school, called for a special fee of $27.20 per semester per student.

The fee would raise more than $400,000 annually, with the money set aside to benefit the estimated 12,000 descendants of the slaves once owned by the Maryland province of the Jesuits. The Jesuits sold the slaves in 1838—for $108,000—to finance the struggling college that became Georgetown University.

Two years ago, the Georgetown administration promised to rename a school building after one of the sold slaves, Isaac Hawkins, and to establish the new Institute for the Study of Slavery.

The university acted in the wake of a campaign by black author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, son of the former Black Panther Paul Coates, to bring the once-fringe issue of slavery reparations to the national stage.

In an influential essay in The Atlantic, entitled “The Case for Reparations,” Coates argued passionately that financial payments to black Americans were a matter of restorative justice.
The legacy of slavery, he said, is that blacks continue to live in strictly segregated communities that severely limit their economic and educational advancement.

“From 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state and local—repeatedly plundered black communities,” Coates wrote. “Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it.”

Coates was hesitant to put a price tag on this financial plundering, but others were not.

One writer at The Root calculates that Georgetown University owes the descendants of its 272 slaves roughly $50 billion—or 33 times its entire endowment of $1.5 billion.

Another researcher at the University of Connecticut analyzed wages paid in the antebellum South and concluded that U.S. slave labor over 89 years (from 1776 to 1865) was worth between $5.9 and $14.2 trillion in today’s money.

Economist Robert Browne claims the figure is $4.7 trillion—or $147,000 to every black American.

As might be expected, more left-wing Democratic presidential candidates support the idea of reparations—including Senators Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—yet the U.S. public does not.

According to a 2019 YouGov poll, only 20 percent of all voters polled believe that black Americans should receive cash payments from the U.S. government for the past sins of slavery—with 58 percent of blacks supporting the idea and only 13 percent of whites.

Even some Democratic politicians are skeptical. The socialist candidate Bernie Sanders has stated that he believes reparations would be “very divisive.”

“I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities,” Sanders told an interviewer in March. “And I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check.”

Other Democrats worry that the surest way to reelect Donald Trump in 2020 is to insist that white Americans, few of whose ancestors owned slaves (it’s estimated that only 6 percent of whites in the South owned slaves) or who came to America long after slavery was outlawed, be forced to pay for crimes of which they or their ancestors were not responsible.

In addition, some black critics of reparations insist that, while slavery itself was a moral abomination, the U.S. black population overall benefits from living in the U.S. despite past and current discrimination.

The success of many blacks in all walks of life, from Oprah Winfrey and Jay-Z to Barack Obama, attests to this.

While a substantial wage and education gap persists between white and black Americans, overall, U.S. blacks generally enjoy a standard of living far above that of African nations today.

According to the American Community Survey, in 2015 the income per capita in the U.S. was $34,399 for Asians, $32,910 for whites, $20,277 for blacks and $16,580 for Latinos.

This puts U.S. blacks far behind such rich countries as Norway ($81,000) and Japan ($39,000) but roughly equal to Greece ($20,408) and Portugal ($23,186), and far ahead of all African nations, including Nigeria ($2,049), Kenya ($1,857), Senegal ($1,471), Tanzania ($1,134) and Liberia ($780), founded by freed U.S. slaves.

Despite this, many still insist that reparations for the past sins of slavery and other forms of racial discrimination are appropriate.

They point out that the concept of restitution has deep roots in both the Bible and in the common law.

In the Mosaic Law, a man who inflicts injury must pay monetary compensation for the wrong done—for example, if you steal something you must give it back or pay four times its value (Exodus 22:1).

This is why, in Luke’s Gospel, the tax collector Zacchaeus tells Jesus “if I have overcharged people on their taxes, I will give them back four times as much! (19:1-10).”

Catholic writers such as Matthew J. Cressler draw from this the notion that white Americans must contribute to reparation payments because they benefited somehow from past racism against African Americans—even if they only came to the U.S. in recent decades.

“White Catholics count ourselves among the greatest beneficiaries of the American dream and thus dare not think, let alone speak aloud, the fact that our Dream was built on profits plundered from Black women, men, and children,” he writes in Slate.

What were these profits? And how did U.S. Catholics, in particular, plunder them?

Cressler argues that Catholic immigrants in America, despite facing their own discrimination and attacks from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, benefited disproportionately from government programs such as the G.I. Bill after World War II.

While white Catholic veterans received tuition assistance, he says, “only a fifth of the black veterans who applied for education benefits actually received any.”

This is one of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s major points: “America was built on the preferential treatment of white people—395 years of it.”

In addition, Catholics in the 1970s, in cities such as Boston, resisted government attempts at forced school desegregation through busing.

“White Catholics share responsibility for making reparations for racial injustice because we share in its history,” Cressler concludes. “We invested in it and profited from it. We continue to invest in it and profit from it.”

The problem is, most Americans simply don’t believe this is true—i.e., that they “invest” in racial injustice and personally profit from it.

Instead, the overwhelming majority believe they have not profited from slavery or racism—and see no reason why they should pay trillions of dollars for wrongs done by people who died 150 years ago.

What’s more, some argue that it was white Americans following a Republican president who freed African slaves during the Civil War—and those slaves were owned almost entirely by members of the Democratic Party.

Does this mean that Democrats today should pay restitution to the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers from the North who died fighting the Civil War?

Should those descendants add up how much money those 350,000 slain soldiers would have earned over their lifetimes, calculate what that sum would be worth in today’s dollars, with interest, and then present the current Democratic Party with the bill?

Put another way: do individuals who did not participate in a crime owe restitution?

The lack of legal and moral clarity is probably why reparations have been relatively rare in international law and have almost always concerned damages inflicted by war.

After World War I, the Allies extracted financial reparations from the Axis Powers by putting much of the blame for the war on the living civilian populations for cooperating in the war effort.

Yet the financial burdens of those reparations were so severe they led to deep resentment by the civilian population, the rise of the Nazi Party, and another, even more horrific, world war.

As a result, after World War II the Allies decided to seek minimal financial reparations from Germany, Italy, and Japan, mostly in the form of confiscated intellectual property and forced labor.

Instead, the Allies rebuilt the countries and turned former enemies into friends.

And that, in the end, is probably the strongest argument that reparations will end up doing more harm than good: they will only further divide the country into warring victim classes fighting over federal payouts.

After all, virtually all ethnic groups have grievances. Few suffered like African slaves, to be sure, but many have legitimate claims if you go far enough into the past. During World War II, the U.S. government turned away thousands of Jewish refugees as potential spies who later died in concentration camps.

Forcing new immigrants from Vietnam and Honduras to fund reparation payments to immigrants from the distant past, or to the descendants of African slaves, will not lead to the “reconciliation” that is the stated purpose behind restitution.

Instead, it will lead to even more of the racial animosity that Ta-Nehisi Coates rightly deplores.

And few believe that this will benefit anyone.

This article was originally published online in Crisis Magazine.

The post The Growing Controversy over Slavery Reparations first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Politically active Catholics who take the teachings of their Church seriously often turn to the body of papal and conciliar teachings known as Catholic Social Teaching (CST).  While conservatives often emphasize the principle of subsidiarity found in these teachings – the idea that the organization closest to a problem is usually best able to solve it – the principle of solidarity is crucial as well.

Solidarity can be defined as the virtue or habit of recognizing our duties to the common good and arranging our social and political institutions so that basic human needs can be met.

One obvious example of how the principle of solidarity affects community life is health care.

In their landmark 1993 statement on healthcare reform and Catholic Social Teaching, A Framework for Comprehensive Health Care Reform, the U.S. Catholic bishops insisted that the principle of solidarity in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) requires that quality healthcare be available to everyone regardless of ability to pay.

Basing their analysis on Jesus’ admonition to care for “the least of these (Matt 25:40),” the bishops insisted that “genuine health care reform must especially focus on the basic health needs of the poor…”  They even went so far as to say that the poor have a compelling claim to “first consideration” and access to “comprehensive benefits.”

These mandates do seem at least partially fulfilled by 2010 Obamacare system.

Yet others clearly are not.

Solidarity with our fellow humans also requires respect for life, the bishops said – and it was Obamacare’s provisions on abortion and birth control services that led the bishops to reluctantly refuse to endorse the system once it was finally passed.

Moreover, the mandate for serving the poor has to be balanced by other considerations of justice, the bishops said, including cost containment and controls and what they termed “equitable financing.”

“We have the best health care technology in the world,” the bishops observed, “but tens of millions have little or no access to it and the costs of the system are draining our nation, our economy, our families and our Church to the breaking point.”

Indeed.  In late January 2019, two weeks after the close of the Open Enrollment period for health care insurance, we received our dreaded annual notice from Anthem Blue Cross:  the monthly premiums for our family would increase 25% over the year before, from $1,445 per month to $1,800.

When the comically misnamed Affordable Care Act first went into effect in 2010, our premiums were $350 per month for a high-deductible policy ($5,000 per person) roughly equivalent to the Bronze Plan on most exchanges.

The new price of $1,800 per month represents a total increase of 414.2% — or about 22.7% per year over the past eight years.

This is a far cry from the $2,500 annual savings that President Obama promised.

Like thousands of others, my family is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when it comes to health insurance:  we earn too much to qualify for Obamacare subsidies… yet the price of even the cheapest Obamacare plans are increasingly out of reach.

With five children and two in college, paying $1,800 per month means hard choices.

And we’re constantly told we’re actually lucky.

Were we to pay for one of the ADA-compliant policies on the exchanges, we’d be paying $2,500 per month in 2019 – or $30,000 per year.

That’s more than our mortgage.  And it’s a lot more than we pay in Social Security, State Income Taxes or even Federal Income Taxes.

Right now, health insurance is our single greatest expense outside of college tuition.

And to make matters worse, there is no escape:  in many blue states, such as California and Washington, the Democrat-controlled legislatures quickly outlawed the short-term and other co-called “catastrophe” plans that would allow families to access affordable coverage even temporarily.

This is a deliberate attempt to force everyone into a “one-size fits all” Obamacare system.

All this is further complicated by a healthcare delivery system built on outright greed:

The Democrats sold their healthcare plan to the insurance companies with the promise that it would mean billions in additional profits.

To pay for the uninsured poor, the Democrats promised a system that would force everyone to purchase the insurance companies’ products – with temporary cash infusions from the government until the insurance companies could raise premiums to a maximum level.

Since buying into the system was mandatory, the insurance companies had an artificial monopoly:  consumers could choose between two or three similar plans all equally expensive.

And the Democrats certainly delivered on their promises to the insurance companies:  Anthem’s Executive Chair, Former President and CEO Joseph Swedish, earned $18 million in 2017.

Long Beach, Calif.-based Molina Healthcare’s new CEO, Joseph Zubretsky, earned $19.7 million in total compensation the same year.

To be fair, Obamacare did result in extending healthcare coverage to roughly 20 million people who lacked coverage before – but at the cost of making healthcare insurance beyond the ability of many middle class families to pay.

Instead of funding coverage for the poor from general tax revenues, the Democrats created a new, regressive tax – a kind of second income tax — that specifically targets middle class families and allows the fraud, waste, overbilling and greed of the existing insurance system to remain in place.

Twenty-five years after the Catholic bishops outlined a statement of basic principles of healthcare reform based on Catholic Social Teaching, the cost of health care in the U.S. is still skyrocketing.

Worst of all, the burden of paying for health care increasingly falls disproportionately on middle class families who, increasingly, cannot afford it.

Many Americans now must deliberately reduce their work hours or incomes so they are eligible for Obamacare subsidies, making it difficult to save for retirement or send their children to college.

Even Americans who receive their health insurance through their employers often do so at the cost of stagnant or reduced wages and shortchanged retirement programs.

The lesson of the Obamacare disaster is that, if solidarity means anything, it means burdens must be shared equitably – not merely shifted from one group to another.

The post Skyrocketing Obamacare Premiums Forcing Many Middle Income Families to Make Difficult Choices first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.