Posted on 08/17/2004 2:38:57 PM PDT by unspun
By The Leader-Chicago Bureau (admin@illinoisleader.com)
CHICAGO -- Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes has just released a statement clarifying what appeared to be a surprising position he took at a news conference yesterday.
"I think a cogent argument could be made for reparations in principle," Keyes is quoted as saying to reporters yesterday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
The Chicago Tribune expanded:
Keyes gave a brief tutorial on Roman history and said that in regard to reparations for slavery, the U.S. should do what the Romans did: "When a city had been devastated [in the Roman empire], for a certain length of time--a generation or two--they exempted the damaged city from taxation."Keyes proposed that for a generation or two, African-Americans of slave heritage should be exempted from federal taxes--federal because slavery "was an egregious failure on the part of the federal establishment."
The response from conservatives was immediate. "Who downstate will now vote for Keyes?" wrote IllinoisLeader.com reader Randall Mead of Springfield today. "I certainly won't."
This afternoon, Keyes released the following statement, clarifying his position:
I have consistently opposed the effort to extort monetary damages from the American people. As I have argued in the past, the great sacrifices involved in the Civil War represented the requital in blood and treasure for the terrible injustices involved in slavery. In this form the so called "reparations" movement represents an insult to the historic commitment that many Americans made to the end of slavery, which included the sacrifice of their lives.I have also consistently maintained that the history of slavery, racial segregation and discrimination did real damage to black Americans, left real and persistent material wounds in need of healing.
In various ways through the generations since the end of slavery, America has tried to address this objective fact, but without real success. This was at least in part the rational for many elements of the Great Society programs of the sixties, and for the original and proper concept of affirmative action developed under Republican leadership during the Nixon years.
Unfortunately, the government-dominated approaches of the Great Society, which purported to heal and repair the legacy of historical damage, actually widened and deepened the wounds. They undermined the moral foundations of the black community and seriously corrupted the family structure and the incentives to work, savings, investment, and business ownership.
The idea I have often put forward to address this challenge involves a traditionally Republican, conservative and market-oriented approach: removing the tax burden from the black community for a generation or two in order to encourage business ownership, create jobs and support the development of strong economic foundations for working families.
This has the advantage of letting people help themselves, rather then pouring money into government bureaucracies that displace and discourage their own efforts. It takes no money from other citizens, while righting the historic imbalance that results from the truth that black slaves toiled for generations at a tax rate that was effectively 100 percent.
I have also made it clear that while I believe that the descendants of slaves would be helped by this period of tax relief, my firm goal and ultimate objective is to replace the income tax, and thereby free all Americans from this insidious form of tax slavery. It is well known that this is one of the key priorities of the Keyes campaign.
In response to Keyes' statement, conservative Jack Roeser of Family Taxpayers Network told IllinoisLeader.com, "I expect Keyes would say this is one of those interesting subjects to be talked about among people sharing ideas. Reparations is an impractical concept. Everybody in every category has been wronged in one or the other, and you cannot single one out."
Roeser continued, "Keyes is a man of ideas, and I expect he gets into discussions like this that are proper in their proper place, but that he would never vote for reparations. The problem with American politics is that people don't get into deep discussions."
© 2004 IllinoisLeader.com -- all rights reserved
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That's class warfare.
Yep. :( And they're the same people who claim to support substance over style; meanwhile, they're supporting a race-baiting politician whose reparations proposal dwarves anything any liberal politician has ever proposed.
Bingo.
No, it is not. Take a poll of blacks. It is one of the issues that drives so many blacks into the nanny state of the democrats....they think they will get reparations from them. And I suggest that you tune into BET or a hip-hop station. What D's say to blacks and what D's say to the rest of us is very different. It is as different as what Arafat says in English and what he says in Arabic.
That's different. Picture this: you go into a restaurant with two of your friends and agree to split the bill, which comes to $9. You owe one of your friends $3 because you broke his favorite beer mug last week when you were at his house. So instead of paying him $3, you agree to let him eat for free. Now you are left to split the bill with your other friend - each of you paying $4.50. In reality you are making a payment to your friend of $3, which is equally being financed between you and your other friend, who had nothing to do with breaking the mug. This is what Keyes is proposing: he is making a payment to blacks by forcing others to pay extra, even those whose ancestors were not slaveowners.
Is Alan Keyes even considering the tremendous resentment of blacks that such a tax-relief plan would create? We don't want to see the Klan go mainstream, do we?
Of course it is. And you support it.
I can possibly show you thousands of comments from FReepers vehemently opposed to anything even remotely resembling reparations, calling it a "liberal" notion that conservatives will always oppose, if I took the time to do the searches.
But the moment that Keyes says that he thinks reparations in one form or another are OK, reparations become a conservative principle?
If there is Keyes bashing going on, it's only because there is ample reason to bash Keyes.
It gets the whole fairness of income taxes issue out there --- Slave descendents could say they're freed twice and the rest of us are still waiting to be freed.
I take the position Jim Robinson did above. I don't oppose anybody getting a tax cut.
I've seen polls of blacks. They are evenly split over reparations. They do not favor the concept, by a long shot.
And the resentment such a plan would cause would make Selma look like a picnic.
Did Bush give you a tax refund? He gave me one and I was thankful. I guess everyone didn't get one --- liberals didn't seem thankful.
I am a little amazed to see this class warfare/envy based argument dandied about so freely here on FR.
But maybe I shouldn't be, the left would never have gotten so powerful if this argument weren't so insidiously tempting.
Even if spendng is cut accordingly, whites would shoulder a larger portion because many blacks would shoulder no portion at all.
Tell you what, pay the descendants of slaves reparations by taking the money out of the pockets of the descendants of slave owners.
I'm all for that.
Possibly the very blacks least likely in favor of "reparations" would be the ones qualifying for a tax break. Likely the ones who don't work wouldn't get the tax break and maybe those who do work and got ahead will decline their "reparations".
I'm frankly not all that surprised. :-(
No he isn't, he didn't say we should raise the tax burden on everyone else to pay for it.
The argument you made is precisely the one the left makes about "tax cuts to the rich".
The blacks who get the tax break could stimulate the economy by spending it --- like we all spent our tax refunds.
If this is something that Keyes is serious about, it's as much a knife in the back of conservatives as George Bush's stance on Mexican illegals. Supporting a candidate shouldn't mean you have to come up with hokey rationalizations for all of their bad policies. Reparations----even in the form of tax relief----should not even be considered by conservatives.
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