So the total Net Wealth of the US is about $84.9 Trillion according to this WSJ Article:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-net-worth-hits-high-of-84-9-trillion-1434038401
80K * 33 Million Black people = ~$2.6 Trillion
Theoretically, this is probably possible, though most of that net worth is not in cash, but in some form of assets.
The monetary base is roughly $36 Trillion, so printing $2.6 trillion and giving it out would create inflation of roughly 7% at once. While that would be terrible economic policy, it's probably not the end of the world (though probably would be the impetus for some type of financial crisis). The Fed effectively printed quite a bit more than that since 2008 to try to goose the economy in the great recession through its various levers.
The Fed, realistically, could use its various mechanisms to take the $2.6 trillion out of the economy somewhere else (and probably trigger a recession) to avoid inflation. Of course, it might have looked like as net positive for the economy in 2009! There were some economists promoting the idea of just printing money and giving it away to help fight the recession.
That said...
$1.5 Million to 42 Million black Americans is $63 Trillion Dollars. Again, the entire wealth of the United States (in private hands, at least) is $84.9 Trillion. 64/85 is about 75%.
So you're saying, that the only equitable solution is that US taxes everybody else at 75+% of what they own... Not their income, we're talking selling cars, selling houses, liquidating 401K's, etc, and then forks that over to the black community? And that's conservative? You're saying that if not for slavery, black people would either account for 75% of the nation's wealth OR that the economy would be roughly 65% bigger than it is today?
And you wonder why there aren't any politicians that support taking 75% of everybody's shit to give it to 12% of the population for something that happened 150 years ago?
I'm not one to usually say "Hey, let's look at what's politically feasible", but this is like literally impossible. I don't even know how you would transfer that much wealth.
Dude, I get that it's unjust, but I didn't build the white power structure, neither did anybody else alive today. Someone set shit up that way hundreds of years ago, and we all were just born into it. White people don't understand white privilege because it's just the way the world has always been for them. You can be mad at them for it, but you're not going to gain an inch by cursing out every white dude on the street for something he doesn't even understand.
It's not rocket science to navigate the white game. White people do it all the time. Minorities from all over the world do it, black people do it. There's really nothing exceptional about it at all. One could teach black people that don't understand how to play the game how to play it.
The white game could be changed to be something that's more easily navigated by everybody, but somebody will have to educate people that play the white game why it's a white game, in terms that everybody can understand.
I don't think it's about "offending white sensibilities" so much as recognizing that learning to navigate the system as it is, and tweaking it in ways that make it more equitable is a lot easier than throwing the whole thing out and creating something from scratch and is at least something that progress can be made on relatively quickly.
For what it's worth, during our discussion I went and read Ta-Nehisi Coates article from a few years ago in the Atlantic called "The Case for Reparations" and have come around a bit on the issue. I still don't think Bernie deserves the criticism, and definitely don't think the right answer is $1.5 Million. Coates doesn't really propose anything specifically, other than "hey let's talk about what this might be".
