Last Wednesday, on Sept. 14, the Technician ran an opinion piece arguing that reparations for slavery should be paid to all black Americans. The author did a good job making the moral case for reparations and went on to defend his position against a few arguments that he commonly hears. However, notably absent from the article were any practical details of such a complex plan. Most importantly, the author failed to identify who should have to pay for these reparations.

Yet, before we can even begin to get to that important point, we must figure out how much these reparations would cost. According to the United States Census Bureau, there are approximately 40 million black Americans living in our country today and the article contends that all of them should be paid. Yet, the author again gives no details over how much each black American should be paid. He says it is outrageous to believe the suffering of slavery cannot be quantified with a dollar amount, yet he doesn’t even try to quantify it himself. Although I agree that it is impossible to come up with a logical number to repay suffering that happened decades or even centuries ago, for the sake of argument, let’s say every black American will be paid between $1,000 and $10,000 annually. That equates to between $40 and $400 billion paid every single year.

Now that we have a price for this program, we again return to who should pay this price. Perhaps the only possible answer is the federal government. No one else can really come up with hundreds of billions of dollars. The only problem, though, is that the federal government doesn’t actually have any money. So, this money must come from a tax or it will just be added to our federal budget deficit, which according to the Congressional Budget Office, is going to be around $544 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. That, of course, will be added to our $19 trillion national debt that will have to be paid off some day. So, ultimately, tax-paying Americans, the vast majority of whom had ancestors that had absolutely nothing to do with slavery, will be the ones paying for this program. This hardly makes sense.

I think Thomas Sowell, a Stanford economist, put it best by saying, “No way are millions of white, Asian and Hispanic Americans going to pay reparations for something that happened before their ancestors ever set foot on American soil. Even those whites whose ancestors were here before the Civil War know that most of those ancestors — whether they lived in the North or the South — owned no slaves.” It isn’t really reparations if the people are paying for ancestors who had nothing to do with slavery in the first place.

Further, we have numerous welfare programs that help those in need, including black Americans. While welfare is for everyone, black people in need benefit from this program. In fact, they use it more than any other racial group in the United States per capita, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It’s hard to claim, then, that America has done nothing to help black Americans.

I would like to make it clear that I am not saying I’m opposed to private institutions or families who used to own slaves paying reparations to descendants of those slaves; people can do whatever they want with their own money. Georgetown University, for example, is a private university that just made headlines for exactly that reason and they were commended for it. However, there is a huge difference between that and the government forcibly taking money and redistributing it. Looking at reparations from all points of view, they just aren’t realistic in American society today.