The Issue: New York City lawmakers voting on a bill to study potential compensation for slavery reparations.
It’s a shame that the people voted in to protect and serve New York are destroying it with their ridiculous bills (“Reparations bid wins,” Sept. 13).
The City Council needs an immediate overhaul.
Slavery ended over 200 years ago in New York, and yet councilmembers want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to hand out free money.
Minority Leader Joseph Borelli (R-SI) put it best: “If they can introduce me to one New Yorker who owned a slave, I’d be happy to consider it. But until then, I am not paying a dime as a reparation for a harm I did not cause.”
Lance Lovejoy
Maspeth
The premise behind this reparations task-force bill is totally absurd.
Like other New Yorkers, some African-Americans do very well, and others don’t.
If the council really wants to address the issue, they should look at the elephant in the room — our failing education system.
If New York had school choice and vouchers, it would give African-American parents the opportunity to remove their child from a failing school and place them in one where they can actually learn.
Many states and cities have these programs with resounding success.
Bill Isler
Floral Park
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, and approved the 13th Amendment on Feb. 1, 1865, thereby abolishing slavery.
Around 320,000 white Union soldiers died in the effort to free enslaved people.
My question is: If reparations are given to Black descendants of slavery, will the descendants of white Union soldiers who died freeing those very same slaves also receive reparations?
Dan Carr
San Diego, Calif.
New York does not have any obligation to pay reparations.
So why is this topic still being discussed?
Any “proof” that New York is responsible for reparations would make for a great story, but that’s all it would ever be.
Elizabeth Tebeaux
College Point, Texas
So, people who never owned slaves will pay people who were never slaves.
Makes sense.
How much fraud and corruption will come out of this?
Carol Meltzer
Manhattan
I wonder if anyone in the party with a legacy of slavery, racism and the KKK — the Democrats — has ever taken a basic course in economics.
With nearly two million African-Americans in New York, a payout would be a very big number.
But what would be the impact?
In Economics 101, I learned the term “too much money chasing too few goods,” meaning if the government dumps a lot of money into the economy, it will cause inflation that affects everyone, not just the recipients of taxpayer largesse.
Furthermore, as Borelli pointed out, there isn’t a single person in New York today who ever was a slave or owned slaves.
The price of slavery has already been paid for — at Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania and elsewhere.
Andrew MacDonald
Fanwood, NJ
Comparing the immense value of growing up and living in 21st century America for African-Americans, vs. in their ancestors’ countries of origin in Africa, would certainly turn reparations on its head.
Miles Kuttler
Aventura, Fla.
The issue of reparations has reared its ugly head again.
Reparations should be made, but the Democrats should pay for it.
After all, as I recall, many New Yorkers fought and died to free the slaves from Democratic slaveholders.
A Democrat even killed Abraham Lincoln, the architect of Black freedom.
And after losing the war, Democrats became the party of the KKK and Jim Crow laws.
Reparations are just another step in that sad path.
But if Democrats have truly seen the light and wish to make amends for their evil deeds, they should do so.
Forcing innocent people to pay for the sins of people who came before them is yet another injustice.
Lonnie Kennedy
Oklahoma City, Okla.
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