Nah, much better not to try to get one's arguments from the left, responding
to neo-con, neo-lib or centrist bilge. ;-) Why bother to send it to the Post
if you did not want to get published? Let those conservatives totally
dominate the public sphere...
Michael Pugliese
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brown, Martin (NCI)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 1:29 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:10042] Krauthammer and Reparations
> One of the myriad of Washington Post house conservatives ran an OpEd last
> week saying he was for reparations to African Americans. But, he
basically
> said they should take $50K per family and forever after shut up about
> affirmative action. Here is my response, to be published in the
Washington
> Post tomorrow. The fact that the Post accepted this makes me worry that I
> am being compromised. So here it is for Pen-L to critique. Could you
have
> done a better job and still been published?
>
> By the way, it is now really easy to submit a letter to the Post by email
> through their web page.
>
>
> In his April 6 op-ed column, Charles
> Krauthammer cavalierly suggests that the U.S. government make one-time
> reparation payments of
> $50,000 per family of four to African Americans. Even if one were to
> accept the dubious assertion that all forms of active discrimination, or
> the lingering effects of the legacy of discrimination, are in the past,
> the price he puts on the historic economic injustice done to African
> Americans is awfully cheap.
>
> One measure of this injustice, itself only partial, is the difference
> in household net wealth accumulated by middle age. Data from the U.S.
> Health and Retirement Survey indicate this difference to be at least
> $100,000 on average, double Charles Krauthammer's recommended payment.
> This figure itself underestimates the true difference because it is
> expressed in 1994 dollars and because it does not take into account both
> the much higher percentage of African American families with negative net
> wealth and the higher percentage of white families with very large
> amounts of net wealth, which tends to be under-measured by standard
> government statistics.
>
> Most tragic, it does not take into account the economic value of the
> deficit in human life expectancy experienced by African Americans, itself
> heavily related to economic deprivation. In 1993, only 66 percent of
> African American men reached age 60, compared with 84 precent of white
> men.
>
> Standard economic valuations used in legal and regulatory settings
> place a monetary value of at least $100,000 on a year of life expectancy
> (and often much more). So it appears that the just economic compensation
> that Charles Krauthammer advocates comes with a much higher price tag
> than he, at first glance, is willing to acknowledge.
>
