Bowman Proposes Staggering $14 Trillion Reparations Plan
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has proposed that American taxpayers pay a shocking $14 trillion in “reparations” as part of his plan to make up “for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.”
Bowman — who recently pleaded guilty to pulling a fire alarm in the U.S. Capitol, which appeared to have been an attempt to prevent a key vote from taking place — proposed his $14 trillion plan on Tuesday.
The far-left congressman bizarrely declared that the federal government needed to foot the bill, claiming that there was a way to fund his plan “without raising taxes on anyone” — despite the fact that the federal government has no money of its own and is already in massive debt. Printing or borrowing the money to avoid raising taxes will just indirectly raise costs for Americans, as it will increase inflation and force the American people to pay the bill further in the future.
“When COVID was destroying us, we invested in the American people in a way that kept the economy afloat,” Bowman told the Journal News in an interview published January 16. “The government can invest the same way in reparations without raising taxes on anyone.”
“Where did the money come from?” he added. “We spent it into existence.”
Bowman previously signed on as one of nine sponsors of H.R. 414 in May 2023, which was Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) resolution declaring that the United States “has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people in the United States.”
The resolution didn’t just address slavery, as it also claimed to cover restitution for past policies that disenfranchised Black Americans, including “banking, consumer, housing, health, education, and employment discrimination.”
H.R. 414 also addressed the failure of the U.S. government to “keep Black people safe from or actively sanctioning White domestic terrorism and failing to prosecute it when it occurred,” as well as “the impacts of government-imposed segregation.”
The resolution declared that “financial reparations must be paid by the Federal Government for an amount that respected economists have estimated totals, at minimum, $14,000,000,000,000 to eliminate the racial wealth gap that currently exists between Black and White Americans.”
The bill also included an estimate from “scholars” who claimed that the U.S. “benefited from 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the end of slavery in 1865, which would be valued at $97,000,000,000,000 today.”
The staggering $14 trillion price tag of the far-left lawmakers’ resolution is even more shocking when put into perspective, as the federal government spent a fraction of that in all of fiscal year 2022 — spending $6.13 trillion, according to the U.S. Treasury.
Meanwhile, the Journal News has calculated that every Black American could be paid more than $300,000 each from the proposed plan.
“There are about 42 million African Americans in the United States, representing 12% of our nation’s population, according to the 2020 census,” the outlet reported. “That means the proposed reparations program could deliver roughly $333,000 per person. Bowman said it could be paid over decades.”
“Who says the $14 trillion needs to be paid out in one shot?” Bowman told the outlet. “It might be possible for it to be paid out over 5 or 10 or 20 years. You could take that $333,000 and break it up into monthly checks over X amount of time.”
“There are creative ways to do the right thing and do what needs to be done,” he added.
