Dr. Phil said that a Duke University professor’s plan to hand out enormous checks to American descendants of slaves would result in them going “broke” six months later.
Economics professor William Darity wants the US Government to pay $350,000 to each of the 40 million descendants of slaves, which would add an additional $14 trillion to the $31 trillion national deficit.
The “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century” co-author was part of a reparations on the CBS show’s Tuesday episode, which included political writer Joshua Ferguson and civil rights activist Bob Woodson.
Darity said that reparations should be paid to the Black Americans who were descended from slaves and how much be determined by the average wealth gap between races.
“The amount should be dictated by the disparity in wealth between Black and White Americans, which at the current moment amounts to in excess of $840,000 per household,” he declared.
Darity asserted that the “objective” of his plan was to “eliminate the racial wealth gap in the United States.”
He noted that doing so “would require an expenditure of $14 trillion, which would be distributed evenly across the 40 million Black American descendants of U.S. slavery.”
“That would be approximately $350,000 per person,” Darity detailed.
When Dr. Phil asked where the money would come from, the college professor confidently stated that the cash would come from the federal government’s coffers.
“It would be paid by the federal government in the same way in which the federal government has met the expenses that were paid out for the purposes of trying to deal with the great recession and also, most recently, with the economic downturn associated with the great pandemic,” he added.
Ferguson pointed out that the country doesn’t have that kind of cash laying around.
“First of all, the U.S. government doesn’t have money. All of their money comes from taxes. To say you’re not going to take it from people today, you’re right,” he remarked.
“You’re going to take it from future generations. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Woodson added that he “cannot think of any group of people who have been made wealthy by just transferring money to them.”
Darity said that there has “never been a point” in US history that the incomes of Black and White people were equivalent, and that the government was guilty of causing the wealth gap.
“There is a substantial history of the United States government providing financial assets to white citizens, when it did not provide similar assets to Black citizens,” he stated.
He added that the Homestead Act of 1860 gave 160 acre land grants to 500,000 White families, while the 40 acres promised to Black Americans was not fulfilled by the US government.
“That was a transfer that has resulted in the situation in which 45 million living white Americans are continuing to be beneficiaries of those land patents,” Darity continued.
Dr. Phil thanked him for the “indisputable” history lesson, but said the plan was unfeasible.
“I can tell you from a psychological perspective that if you take $350,000 or $840,000, and you write a check to any group of people – Black, White, poor, homeless, whatever,” the host began.
“You give any group of people that much money and say, ‘There you go. Best of luck,’ you come back in six months. They’re going to be broke.”
“Whatever reparations are done, that would be an absolute disaster, as opposed to guidance and help in creating generational wealth, as opposed to income,” Dr. Phil explained.
Darity insinuated that the comment was racist. “No one ever says that there’s going to be mismanagement of funds when we’re talking about the distribution of reparations payments to other communities.”
“I just said it,” Dr. Phil shot back. “I just said, ‘you give that money to anybody, they’re going to mismanage it.”
“They’re going to blow it.’ Look at the fraud that just occurred with all of the money that was given in support of COVID.”