Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
I'm not backpedaling at all. While it was meant in jest in reply to the extremely stupid idea of giving a group of people a large sum of money for basically screwing them over for hundreds of years, when the cold hard fact that a very large percentage of them live in poverty and are addicts to drugs and alcohol. It would almost CERTAINLY result in a lot of them spending that money on more drugs and more alcohol and the vicious cycle would just continue, except there would be no more reserve for them to go back too.
|
If someone gave any group of people half a million dollars each, there would certainly be a large increase in people spending money on drugs and alcohol.
That said, there is no way to think that a single lump sum payment would be a good idea, especially due to the massive societal dysfunction on the reserves. Even talking about it right now in an even remotely serious fashion is borderline idiotic.
If something like this was to happen, there would need to be large scale property transfers from the reserve to individual natives, probably including funding options for purchasing property that wasn't on the reserve. There would need to be perpetual funding available all natives in the form of social assistance of one form or another, based on some type of qualification system, above and beyond existing programs. Such funding should cover educational expenses, retraining, expanded housing assistance, etc.
Without those provisions, it would never happen. With those provisions, it might cost the government even more than we are paying now.