NYC votes for reparations task force: Letters to the Editor — Sep. 16, 2024

The Issue: New York City lawmakers voting connected a measure to survey imaginable compensation for slavery reparations.

It’s a shame that the radical voted successful to support and service New York are destroying it with their ridiculous bills (“Reparations bid wins,” Sept. 13).

The City Council needs an contiguous overhaul.

Slavery ended implicit 200 years agone successful New York, and yet councilmembers privation to walk billions of payer dollars to manus retired escaped money.

Minority Leader Joseph Borelli (R-SI) enactment it best: “If they tin present maine to 1 New Yorker who owned a slave, I’d beryllium blessed to see it. But until then, I americium not paying a dime arsenic a reparation for a harm I did not cause.”

Lance Lovejoy

Maspeth

The premise down this reparations task-force measure is wholly absurd.

Like different New Yorkers, immoderate African-Americans bash precise well, and others don’t.

If the assembly truly wants to code the issue, they should look astatine the elephant successful the country — our failing acquisition system.

If New York had schoolhouse prime and vouchers, it would springiness African-American parents the accidental to region their kid from a failing schoolhouse and spot them successful 1 wherever they tin really learn.

Many states and cities person these programs with resounding success.

Bill Isler

Floral Park

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation connected Jan. 1, 1863, and approved the 13th Amendment connected Feb. 1, 1865, thereby abolishing slavery.

Around 320,000 achromatic Union soldiers died successful the effort to escaped enslaved people.

My question is: If reparations are fixed to Black descendants of slavery, volition the descendants of achromatic Union soldiers who died freeing those precise aforesaid slaves also person reparations?

Dan Carr

San Diego, Calif.

New York does not person immoderate work to wage reparations.

So wherefore is this taxable inactive being discussed?

Any “proof” that New York is liable for reparations would marque for a large story, but that’s each it would ever be.

Elizabeth Tebeaux

College Point, Texas

So, radical who ne'er owned slaves volition wage radical who were ne'er slaves.

Makes sense.

How overmuch fraud and corruption volition travel retired of this?

Carol Meltzer

Manhattan

I wonderment if anyone successful the enactment with a bequest of slavery, racism and the KKK — the Democrats — has ever taken a basal people successful economics.

With astir 2 cardinal African-Americans successful New York, a payout would beryllium a precise large number.

But what would beryllium the impact?

In Economics 101, I learned the word “too overmuch wealth chasing excessively fewer goods,” meaning if the authorities dumps a batch of wealth into the economy, it volition origin ostentation that affects everyone, not conscionable the recipients of payer largesse.

Furthermore, arsenic Borelli pointed out, determination isn’t a azygous idiosyncratic successful New York contiguous who ever was a enslaved oregon owned slaves.

The terms of slavery has already been paid for — astatine Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and elsewhere.

Andrew MacDonald

Fanwood, NJ

Comparing the immense worth of increasing up and surviving successful 21st period America for African-Americans, vs. successful their ancestors’ countries of root successful Africa, would surely crook reparations connected its head.

Miles Kuttler

Aventura, Fla.

The contented of reparations has reared its disfigured caput again.

Reparations should beryllium made, but the Democrats should wage for it.

After all, arsenic I recall, galore New Yorkers fought and died to escaped the slaves from Democratic slaveholders.

A Democrat adjacent killed Abraham Lincoln, the designer of Black freedom.

And aft losing the war, Democrats became the enactment of the KKK and Jim Crow laws.

Reparations are conscionable different measurement successful that bittersweet path.

But if Democrats person genuinely seen the airy and privation to marque amends for their evil deeds, they should bash so.

Forcing guiltless radical to wage for the sins of radical who came earlier them is yet different injustice.

Lonnie Kennedy

Oklahoma City, Okla.

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