Rep. Jamaal Bowman Proposes $14 Trillion Reparations Plan

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) proposed a $14 trillion reparations plan Tuesday “for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.”

The progressive congressman called on the federal government to foot the bill, arguing that there’s a way to pay for it “without raising taxes on anyone.”

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“When COVID was destroying us, we invested in the American people in a way that kept the economy afloat,” Bowman told the Journal News in an interview published January 16. “The government can invest the same way in reparations without raising taxes on anyone.”

“Where did the money come from?” he continued. “We spent it into existence.”

Bowman is among nine sponsors in support of H.R. 414, a resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) in May 2023 to recognize that the U.S. “has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.”

The proposal stretches beyond slavery, to also cover restitution for more government policies the disenfranchised black Americans including “banking, consumer, housing, health, education, and employment discrimination.”

H.R. 414 also addresses the U.S.’s failure to “keep Black people safe from or actively sanctioning White domestic terrorism and failing to prosecute it when it occurred,” as well as “the impacts of government-imposed segregation.”

The bill states that “financial reparations must be paid by the Federal Government for an amount that respected economists have estimated totals, at minimum, $14,000,000,000,000 to eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently exists between Black and White Americans.”

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The resolution also includes an estimate from “scholars” that found that the U.S. “benefited from 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the end of slavery in 1865, which would be valued at $97,000,000,000,000 today.”

To put that $14 trillion price tag into perspective, the federal government spent only $6.13 trillion in the fiscal year of 2022, according to the U.S. Treasury. 

The Journal News calculated that each black American could get more than $300,000 from the proposed plan:

There are about 42 million African Americans in the United States, representing 12% of our nation’s population, according to the 2020 census. That means the proposed reparations program could deliver roughly $333,000 per person. Bowman said it could be paid over decades.

“Who says the $14 trillion needs to be paid out in one shot?” the congressman said. “It might be possible for it to be paid out over 5 or 10 or 20 years. You could take that $333,000 and break it up into monthly checks over X amount of time.”

“There are creative ways to do the right thing and do what needs to be done,” he added.