You've got to hand it to the Squad — just when you think they've hit peak stupid, one of them steps forward and ups the ante. This time, it's Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) — yes, the same Jamaal Bowman who is unable to fathom the workings of an exit door or a fire alarm. Now he's once more after reparations for slavery — that being the idea that people who have never owned slaves should pay money to people who have never been slaves — and says we can pay his estimated $14 trillion tab by "spending the money into existence."
A New York lawmaker wants the federal government to push a $14 trillion reparations measure.
The measure is touted by “Squad” member Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who wants the federal government to be held accountable for slavery and the aftermath of it, according to the Journal News.
Bowman cited the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the “space race” endeavor as examples that would make the measure feasible.
“When COVID was destroying us, we invested in the American people in a way that kept the economy afloat,” said Bowman. “The government can invest the same way in reparations without raising taxes on anyone.”
“Where did the money come from?” Bowman said. “We spent it into existence.”
I take great pride in my vocabulary, but I find I lack sufficient pejoratives to adequately describe how stupid that is. But Bowman, and doubtless the rest of his Squadmates, are blind to the manifest idiocy of this idea. As one of them might say, it's all about the Benjamins.
See Related: Oppose Reparations? You Have 'White Privilege' - Stop Arguing and Fork Over Your Money
Whenever a Democrat talks about "investment," hide your wallet.
Granted, as noted above, this is a guy to whom the workings of a fire alarm are a mystery. It's no surprise that he is economically illiterate — and in that, he fits right in with his fellow Squad members.
See Related: Bowman's New Remarks About Fire Alarm Get Nuked by Lawler, Then He Steps in It on Antisemitism
Jamaal Bowman thinks we can just "spend into existence" $14 trillion. You can't just "spend money into existence;" if a currency is to mean anything, it must have some concrete basis, something that gives it value. With a fiat currency, that something is nothing more than the fact that people accept that money is safely exchanged for value. Debasing the currency destroys that faith.
"Spending money into existence" was a stupid idea when we did it for COVID; pouring money like that into an economy is wildly inflationary, and it is another nail in the coffin of our fiat currency system; if you want to know why it's a bad idea, I can already give you 34 trillion reasons. Jamaal Bowman wants to add almost half that much again to our catastrophic national debt.
Besides the economic aspect, the entire scheme falls apart on any practical basis.
Taking myself as an example: Most of my family has been in North America since well before the Revolution, and since has scattered from Nova Scotia to the Dakotas. But one branch, my paternal grandmother’s family, came to the United States from Hamburg, Germany, in 1851 and settled in New York, later in Ohio – none of them ever owned a slave. So, is my portion of this so-called debt to be reduced by a fourth? Another cogent point: My great-great-grandfather served in the Civil War as a private in a Wisconsin volunteer infantry regiment. He was wounded and, at age 46, died of complications of his wounds — fortunately for me, not before siring my great-grandfather. Does my family get some credit for his sacrifice? How about the families of the estimated 620,000 men, overwhelmingly white men, who perished in the American Civil War? If you ask me, I'd say any debt there is paid.
See Related: Ron DeSantis Nails It on Civil War Question, Articulates the Reason the Republican Party Was Founded
Take as another example someone who (let’s say it quietly) shares the exact ancestry of, oh, let’s say, a certain former President, whose father was a Kenyan student and whose mother was a white American woman. Is he due any payment under this scheme? No one in his ancestry, anywhere, ever was affected by the pre-Civil War Peculiar Institution. But were we to assume he is somehow partially entitled, should his white half pay his black half?
The cold fact is that the very idea of reparations is so stupid as to beggar description. I simply cannot conjure enough adjectives to describe the idiocy of this idea adequately, but allow one metaphor: The idea of reparations for a practice that ended a century and a half ago is to make the case that, for example, a white carpenter in Louisiana owes some monetary debt to an Ivy League-educated attorney who happens to be black.
It’s lunacy. It’s the worst sort of political pandering. It’s idiotic. And now the Squad is once more beating this dead horse.
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
