39,000,000 black people in America x $1M each = $39,000,000,000,000.
Compare that to the $3,500,000,000,000 spent by the federal government in 2014. That’s 11x.
Or compare it to the $17.5T of the US GNP. 2.3x
Or the roughly $200T of all assets in the US. 20%.
This may give us some understanding of why the government didn’t just “buy all the slaves in 1860 and set them free,” when their total value was 50x the federal budget. Or, somewhat apples to apples, 5x as expensive as giving each black person $1M today would be.
Unless I’ve misplaced a number of decimal points somewhere. Which, sadly, is entirely possible. :)
Anytime you start talking about giving a lot of money to a large number of people, the numbers get really big really quickly. But people seldom realize just how large. This is why all the millions of people damaged by cigarette smoking were never going to collect millions each.
BTW, if such a program were put into place, can you imagine the uproar over who qualifies as “black?”
You can settle that easily by using the old Democratic (segregationist) rule. "One drop of black blood."
Dumber than usual. First, estimates of the financial cost of the war vary widely, but $5 billion is within reason. That averages out to around $1250 for each slave - that's the very top of the market.
The real point that you studiously avoid is: this hypothetical buyback of slaves would have been paid for mostly with the taxes of the slaveowners. Kinda like taxing gun owners to compensate for gun seizure.
Really dumb - unless one believes all money belongs to the government and it gets to decide what individuals can keep.
We need to remind the “children” that you don’t always get what you want. In this case we’ve already given them far more than what they need which is very obvious by their self-entitled attitude.