[Always Right]

The odd thing is, most blacks don't pay federal income tax because they are in the lower half where very little federal income tax is paid by anyone. In fact many people get money back as a result of the earned income tax credit. The big winners would be athletes and rap stars, who would save millions.

[Warrior Nurse]

You hit the nail on the head and that is what Alan Keyes knows. Welfare has been in existence for 2 generations and most of the people on the rolls don't pay taxes and a disproportionate number are black so this is not a far fetched idea since it is already occurring in a similar way.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

The odd thing is, most blacks don't pay federal income tax because they are in the lower half where very little federal income tax is paid by anyone. In fact many people get money back as a result of the earned income tax credit.

While there may be a larger percentage of blacks on welfare, to say most of them are on welfare would be very far from the mark. Most blacks are getting paychecks, or collecting unemployment, not welfare.

[harrycarey]

The odd thing is, most blacks don't pay federal income tax because they are in the lower half where very little federal income tax is paid by anyone. In fact many people get money back as a result of the earned income tax credit. The big winners would be athletes and rap stars, who would save millions.

You are right.

Which means that the "reparations" would be in the form of a "refundable" tax credit, meaning that even those who do not pay income tax can get their "refund."

[Kleon]

The odd thing is, most blacks don't pay federal income tax because they are in the lower half where very little federal income tax is paid by anyone. In fact many people get money back as a result of the earned income tax credit. The big winners would be athletes and rap stars, who would save millions.

I've heard this repeated on every Keyes reparations thread, and it's simply not true. If you look at the actual data on zero-tax filing, you'll see that most African-Americans do, in fact, pay income taxes. Also, many of them don't recieve the Earned Income Credit, because the cost of having someone prepare the files is often too high.

The racial or ethnic composition of the 44 million zero-tax filers will roughly mirror the demographics of American tax filers as a whole. For example, white Americans are 83 percent of total taxpayers; the percentage of zero-tax filers who are white is 79 percent. African-Americans are roughly 13 percent of total taxpayers and 17 percent of zero-tax filers.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/ff/zerotaxfilers.html

[mhking]

The odd thing is, most blacks don't pay federal income tax because they are in the lower half where very little federal income tax is paid by anyone.

22% of blacks (per US Census Bureau data) doesn't sound like "most" to me, unless you have some statistical information that I don't have at hand.