The "Trickle Up" Effect: Give Blacks Bailout Money
My buddy called me yesterday. I heard a lot of noise in the background.
"Where are you?" I asked. "A party? Sounds like there are a lot of people around you."
"I'm at Lenox Mall. Man," he said, "you know what they need to do with that bailout money? They don't need to give it to the banks and the carmakers. They need to give it to black people."
I started laughing before he could explain, because I knew exactly where he was headed.
"Hey man," he said, "are you listening to me?"
"Dude, I can hear you. I just got this visual-"
"Don't say anything else. Just listen. You know that seven hundred billion dollars? They need to take the all of it - the whole thing - and just give it to us. We'll have the economy back on its feet in no time, because we will spend it all. Every last dollar."
It was kind of hard to argue with his logic. We did have a consumer driven society. And the president has told us over and over, whenever we've had huge problems with the economy stalling, to "get out there and shop."
"Dude, you have absolutely no sense. But it would bring the automakers back to profitability almost overnight."
"Come on, man. You know we'll spend it. This mall is full of brothers shopping right now with no money. I just saw a brother trying to pay for some stuff at Macy's. The cashier repeated "no sir, that one won't go through" each time she swiped one of his credit cards through her register. So the brother pulls out his last credit card. He looks at her and says, 'I know this one will work.' And it did."
Many of us have literally transformed our brains into barcode readers.
Buying stuff at the mall every weekend has become one of our favorite pastimes. Bragging about the stuff we get that has not even been paid for yet is our second favorite pastime. Dreaming about the stuff we're going to get next is our third.
I have several cousins who could be professional shoppers, they spend so much of their free time in clothing stores. One of them, who aspires to be the black Imelda Marcos, seems to have forgotten that the Marcos credit cards were paid with stolen government money. And our own resident shopping diva-in-training gets as excited about "store credit" as you do about your tax refund.
So my buddy might be onto something.
I decided to do the math, just to humor myself. There are approximately forty million black people in the United States. Seven hundred billion divided by forty million is $17,500 per person.
If you assume that half of us are adult aged, and only divide seven hundred billion by twenty million, you get a nice, even $35,000 per person.
Think of all the car downpayments, plasma TV's, roofs, home additions, hairdos, restaurant outings, dental work, home furnishings, and yes, shoes, shoes, and more shoes that would be bought in the next six three months.
Henry Paulson, I know you read this blog on the sly, while you are waiting by the phone for all those banks you gave all our money to call you back with status reports. You might want to run the numbers on my buddies idea.
The "trickle up" effect could be enormous.
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Comments
If you were a crafty politician, you'd see that you could kill two birds with one stone - shut us up once and for all about slavery's inequities AND jumpstart the economy.
If only we didn't vote as a unified block beholden only to the Democratic Party, it would be a three-fer.
Lyndon Johnson would have at least listened to a plan like that...
...after he got an interest in every Cadillac dealership he could.
But if we can bomb Iraq to shreds a few years ago, then send a 100 billion dollars to rebuild what we destroyed, it sounds pretty similar to the systemic destruction of capital and businesses and productive lives of those who DID rise up after being enslaved and made a way for themselves.
Almost every state east of the Mississippi has its own long forgotten history of striving, successful black businesses centers that were bombed, burned, or demolished long AFTER slavery had ended while local and federal governments turned a blind eye, or assisted the perpetrators in the efforts to simply ruin the lives of innocent, law abiding, productive members of society because they were different.
THAT'S why people are still calling for reparations, Gordo - not because we didn't try, but because whenever we seemed to be getting somewhere, deadly force was used again and again to rip progress we had achieved on our own out of our hands.
************ Between 1824 and 1951 there were over 300 events classified as “White Race Riots” in which entire white communities turned on and destroyed entire Black communities and murdered Blacks in mass. There were 26 such major events and hundreds of smaller ones in major cities and towns across the US during the summer of 1919 alone. This period has been tagged by historians as “The Red Summer of 1919”, because many of the events happened from May to October of that year and the blood of their victims literally painted the streets of America.
That year, tens of thousands of Black Americans were killed, maimed and tens of thousands were made refugees, though never being given refugee status, all for economic, social, political and other reasons both real and imaginary.***************
*************The riots were sparked by postwar tensions of racism, unemployment, inflation, and violence by radical political groups. In 1919 it was estimated that 500,000 African Americans had emigrated from the South to the North and Midwest industrial cities for work during the period bookmarked by World War I.[2] During the war, African-American workers filled many jobs left empty by whites who had joined the military, or new ones created by the war mobilization. In some cities, they were hired as strikebreakers, especially during strikes of 1917.***************
I know your high school and college history books were a little light in this area, but who wants to tell a story about themselves that makes THEM look bad?
My cousins are pretty much middle class black women professionals - lawyers, designers, teachers, government middle management - they are talking about Manolo Blahnik, they are talking about Prada, they are talking about Ferragamo - they are talking about these things because they have no kids yet, or won't be having any.
(I also feel compelled to say that I enjoyed this *and* I was able to not project anything about reparations onto Kris's words.)
My intentions were a tongue-in-cheek look at the propensity for black people, especially those of us who are living paycheck to paycheck, to spend all the money we have (search "savings rate of African Americans; net worth of African Americans on google) on stuff we really don't need.
BTW-i dont think anyone except that Gordon person was thinking about reparations when they read this. But there always has to be a turd in the bunch. can we move on past this?
AMEN and AMEN!!!
I also agree with EVERYTHING you said in this post. We would spend every dime...however, I would pay off my car and student loans first......