Reparations Math: What the Numbers Actually Require and Why Politicians Know It Will Never Happen

Slavery happened. This is not a debatable proposition, and I will not treat it as one. For 246 years, from 1619 to 1865, millions of human beings were held as property on American soil, their labor extracted by force, their families destroyed at auction, their humanity denied by law and custom and theology. The economic value of that stolen labor was immense — it built fortunes, it fueled industries, it financed the infrastructure of a nation that would become the wealthiest in human history. The intergenerational consequences of that theft are real, measurable, and ongoing. Anyone who denies this is either ignorant of history or lying about it.

Now that we have established the moral foundation, let us do what almost no one in this conversation is willing to do. Let us look at the math.

The Proposals on the Table

The most prominent legislative vehicle for reparations is HR 40, formally titled the "Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act." First introduced by Representative John Conyers of Michigan in 1989, and reintroduced in every subsequent Congress, HR 40 does not actually propose reparations. It proposes a commission to study the question. After more than three decades, Congress has not even been willing to study whether to study the problem. This fact alone should tell you everything you need to know about the political viability of the enterprise.

But let us set aside the legislative cowardice and examine the academic proposals — the serious, peer-reviewed attempts to calculate what reparations would actually cost.

William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, in their 2020 book From Here to Equality, proposed the most rigorously calculated estimate. They argue that reparations should close the Black-white wealth gap entirely. Using Federal Reserve data, they calculated the total Black-white wealth gap at approximately $14 trillion. Their proposal: direct payments to eligible descendants of American slaves, totaling roughly $14 trillion.

Thomas Craemer, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut, approached the calculation differently. He estimated the value of slave labor from 1776 to 1865, compounded at 3% interest. His figure: approximately $17 trillion.

Other proposals range from more modest to even more staggering. Some academics have proposed targeted investments — in education, housing, business development — that would total several hundred billion dollars. Others have calculated figures exceeding $20 trillion when including the economic effects of post-slavery discrimination including Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration.

Let us work with the most commonly cited figure: $14 trillion.

The Math That Nobody Wants to Do

The annual Gross Domestic Product of the United States is approximately $28 trillion. The entire federal budget — every dollar spent on defense, Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, education, and everything else the federal government does — is approximately $6.3 trillion. The national debt is approximately $34 trillion.

A $14 trillion reparations program would represent:

• 50% of annual GDP — half of the total economic output of the nation for an entire year
• 222% of the federal budget — more than double what the government spends on literally everything combined
• 41% of the national debt — added to an already unsustainable debt burden

To put this in personal terms: there are approximately 42 million Black Americans who identify as descendants of American slaves. A $14 trillion distribution to this population would amount to approximately $333,000 per person, or roughly $840,000 per household. This is, on its face, a transformative sum. It is also, on its face, a sum that cannot be delivered.

If the federal government attempted to fund a $14 trillion reparations program through taxation, it would need to approximately triple federal tax revenue for a sustained period. The current total federal tax revenue is approximately $4.4 trillion annually. Tripling the tax burden on every American — including every Black American — for multiple years would trigger an economic contraction that would devastate the very communities the program was designed to help. The math does not work. And the politicians who invoke reparations know that the math does not work. That is the point.

The Implementation Questions Nobody Answers

Set aside the funding question entirely. Assume, for the sake of argument, that $14 trillion materializes from the void. The implementation questions are even more intractable than the financial ones.

Who qualifies? Darity and Mullen propose two criteria: an applicant must (1) have identified as Black or African American on a government document for at least 12 years prior to the program and (2) be able to trace ancestry to an enslaved person in the United States. This seems straightforward until you consider the practical implications.

What about mixed-race Americans? A person who is half Black and half white — do they receive full payment, half payment, or no payment? What genetic threshold is applied? And who administers the genetic or genealogical testing? The federal government would need to create an ancestry-verification bureaucracy of unprecedented scale. The historical record of slavery is incomplete — many enslaved people were not documented by name. How does a descendant prove lineage when the records were never kept?

What about recent African immigrants? A Nigerian-American family that arrived in 2005 shares the racial identity of descendants of American slaves but not the specific historical experience that reparations are meant to address. Are they included? Excluded? And on what basis does the government distinguish between Black Americans based on ancestry without creating a racial classification system that would make Jim Crow bureaucrats envious?

What about the 360,000 Union soldiers — overwhelmingly white — who died fighting to end slavery? Their descendants bear a generational cost as well. Does the moral calculus account for blood paid? And what of the white abolitionists who risked everything, the Underground Railroad operators, the families who sheltered the enslaved? The moral ledger is more complex than any reparations framework can accommodate.

The Political Function

Here is the truth that will make some readers uncomfortable but that must be stated plainly: reparations function better as a permanent political promise than as actual policy. This is not an accident. It is a design feature of American electoral politics.

Every election cycle, reparations resurface. Candidates are asked about them. Activists demand them. Town halls discuss them. Passion is generated. Votes are mobilized. And then, after the election, the subject is quietly shelved because every serious politician knows that the math is impossible, the implementation is unworkable, and the political coalition required to pass such legislation does not exist and will not exist in any foreseeable future.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a rational political calculation. Reparations as a promise costs nothing. Reparations as a policy costs everything. The promise generates votes. The policy generates opposition. Therefore, the promise is maintained and the policy is never delivered. The Black community is left with hope perpetually deferred — which is, as Langston Hughes told us, a dangerous thing.

The California Test Case

California provided the most instructive recent example of the gap between reparations rhetoric and reparations reality. In 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 3121, establishing the California Reparations Task Force — the first state-level reparations body in American history. The task force spent two years studying the question and, in 2023, released its final recommendations.

The numbers were staggering. The task force estimated that eligible Black Californians were owed compensation for housing discrimination, mass incarceration, health disparities, and other documented harms. The total estimated cost: approximately $800 billion. California's entire annual state budget is approximately $310 billion.

The result? The California legislature, controlled by a Democratic supermajority that had unanimously supported the creation of the task force, passed a handful of symbolic measures — a formal apology, some regulatory changes — and quietly set aside the financial recommendations. No direct payments were authorized. No $800 billion program was funded. The promise served its political function and was filed away.

This is not a failure of will. It is a mathematical inevitability. And anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something — usually their own candidacy.

What Has Actually Worked

The question that ought to follow the reparations debate — and that almost never does — is this: what specific, implementable policies have actually produced measurable economic gains for Black Americans? Not in theory. Not in academic papers. In reality.

The GI Bill, despite its discriminatory administration after World War II, was used effectively by Vietnam-era Black veterans who enrolled in higher education at rates exceeding their white counterparts and built measurably higher household wealth as a result. The policy was specific, implementable, and funded.

Enterprise zones and opportunity zones, where they have been genuinely implemented (rather than used as tax shelters for unrelated development), have produced measurable job creation and business formation in designated low-income areas. The evidence is mixed but the successes are real and documented.

School choice programs — charter schools, voucher programs, education savings accounts — have produced the most dramatic and well-documented improvements in educational outcomes for Black students. The Stanford CREDO studies show that urban charter schools produce significantly greater learning gains for Black students than traditional public schools. Education is the most powerful intergenerational wealth-building tool in existence.

The Evanston, Illinois model is perhaps the most instructive small-scale example. In 2021, Evanston became the first city in America to actually distribute reparations: $25,000 housing grants to qualifying Black residents who could demonstrate residency during periods of documented housing discrimination. The program was funded by a 3% tax on recreational marijuana sales. It was small, local, specific, and implementable. By 2024, fewer than 200 grants had been distributed, at a total cost of approximately $5 million. It was not $14 trillion. It was not transformative at scale. But it was real. It happened. And it demonstrated that specific, local, funded programs can be delivered — unlike the trillion-dollar promises that never materialize.

The Choice

The moral case for reparations is clear. The economic exploitation of enslaved Black Americans was real, it was massive, and its effects persist. No honest person can deny this. The question is not whether the debt exists. The question is whether the political system will ever pay it — and the answer, based on 36 years of evidence, is no.

This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is an honest one. And honesty, even when it is painful, is more valuable than promises that everyone making them knows will never be kept.

The Black community faces a choice. It can continue to invest political energy and emotional capital in a promise that has been made and broken for four decades — a promise that functions as a perpetual carrot, always dangled, never delivered, useful primarily to the politicians who invoke it and the activists who fundraise on it. Or it can redirect that energy toward the specific, implementable, funded policies that have actually produced measurable results: school choice, enterprise zones, homeownership programs, small business development, financial literacy, and the targeted local initiatives like Evanston's that demonstrate what is actually possible.

The men and women who built Black Wall Street in Tulsa did not wait for reparations. The Black Vietnam veterans who built businesses and families did not wait for reparations. The millions of Black Americans who comprise the largest Black middle class in history did not wait for reparations. They built with what they had, where they were, using every tool available — imperfect tools, insufficient tools, tools that should not have been the only ones available — and they built anyway.

The debt is real. The promise is not. And a community that spends another generation chasing a promise that will never be kept is a community that has traded its agency for a lottery ticket — one that the house has already decided will never pay out.

Demand what can be delivered. Build what you can build. And refuse, absolutely refuse, to let the perfect be the enemy of the possible. The possible is available now. It always has been.