By “Squad” member Rep. Cori Bush from Missouri has called for the United States to increase the federal debt by roughly 40 percent in order to pay reparations to African Americans for slavery that occurred over 150 years ago.
The Daily Mail reported that “the resolution states that the U.S. has a ‘legal and moral’ obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of black people and calls for $14 trillion to be paid – ‘at least the amount of the black white wealth gap,’ Bush told DailyMail.com during a press conference.
The entire U.S. GDP was $25 trillion in 2022. The U.S. is already $31.4 trillion in debt and lawmakers are currently engaged in tedious negotiations over where to cut the budget so they can raise the debt limit.
The $14 trillion figure is in line with the findings of Duke University professor and economist William ‘Sandy’ Darity, who estimates the wealth gap is in excess of $300,000 per person and there are roughly 40 million black people whose ancestors were enslaved in the U.S.
‘We’re working with this administration, we’re talking with other members of Congress, but I’ll say this,’ she said. ‘If we can continue to fund these endless wars, or we can continue to put trillions of dollars into these forever wars, into the Defense budget even beyond what they asked for, if we can send money abroad to help elsewhere, then we have to make sure, because we’re talking about things that are happening now.’
To put the bill in context, the United States spent just over $820 billion on national defense in its most recent budget.
Following Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Case for Reparations,” there has been a major push, especially from the left, to pay African Americans today for slavery and other kinds of discrimination that happened in years past. A recent task force in California created by the state government to study the issue said that millions should be given to that state’s African American community.
San Francisco took things even further. ABC News wrote that “the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee recommended providing a one-time payment of $5 million to eligible recipients, as well as directing funding to target community issues concerning housing, education disparities and the racial wealth gap.
California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. However, up to 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California by 1852, according to the state task force’s preliminary report on reparations recommendations.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the bill to launch the state’s task force, declined to endorse the proposal.
Since entering Congress, Bush has not been without scandal for helping her family pocket some cash. Fox News discovered that her “campaign doled out $60,000 in private security payments last year to Cortney Merritts, who she quietly married [in February].
Merritts, however, pocketed the security payments despite not having a St. Louis private security license, which is needed to perform security functions in the area, Fox News Digital has discovered. Merritts also received the campaign’s cash as it simultaneously paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a St. Louis security firm and another individual for personal protection.
Fox News Digital filed a public records request with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department on Monday morning seeking information regarding Merritts’ private security license. In response, a Sunshine Law administrator said there are ‘no responsive records’ relative to the request, and Merritts does not have a current license.
The records search – which covered the city of St. Louis and its neighboring St. Louis County – encompasses Bush’s entire congressional district. According to the St. Louis Metropolitan PD website: ‘With the exception of St. Louis Police Officers, all persons performing a security function in the City of St. Louis must be licensed to do so through the Private Security Section.'”
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