Another plan I'm all in on — I've never liked Maryland, especially since it became a bedroom community for D.C. goverment "workers" (Updated I was way too generous in my estimate of math literacy)
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Maryland recommends $100K payments to descendants of lynching victims after study
The state’s taxpayers are certainly in for a fun ride.
Maryland is recommending that $100,000 per person be issued to descendants of lynching victims after a state-sponsored lynchings study.
The Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report last month after being established in 2019. The report is described as the first state-sponsored effort in the United States to investigate, document, and "reckon with the history of racial terror lynching within its own borders."
….
"This is just the beginning, and there’s a lot of work to be done," Peña-Melnyk said via The Daily Record.
"The fires of resentment, mistrust, and division that burn in our communities today were lit by torches of racial terror centuries ago, and we cannot extinguish those fires by ignoring how they started," the commission’s report said.
The commission concluded that state officials and institutions were complicit in 38 lynchings that followed the Civil War and that the perpetrators were never held accountable in any of the deaths.
Among 84 recommendations, the group proposed that state leaders atone for the past through cash payments. "Using anti-lynching legislation that was introduced in the Maryland General Assembly in 1898 and 1933 as a guide," the commission recommended that up to $100,000 be paid to every descendant of lynching victims and up to $10,000 for descendants of people who lived in communities impacted by lynchings.
"Identifying Black families affected by racial terror lynching — including those separated, displaced, who lost businesses, were denied the right to bury loved ones, or suffered physical and mental health impacts — is essential for reparatory justice," the report stated.
"Compensation aligns with international human rights law recognizing financial and material redress as a key component of reparations," it explained further.
Lets go to AI:
These are results for what’s a very approximate guess as the the number of descendants a person alive in 1865?
AI Overview
It is impossible to give a single definitive number, as it varies wildly depending on individual circumstances (e.g., how many children they had who survived, and how many of those descendants had children, etc.).
However, for a person alive in 1865 who had a family and whose line did not die out, a very approximate guess would be hundreds, or potentially even thousands, of living descendants today.
Key Factors in this Approximation
Generations: From 1865 to the present (circa 2025), there have been approximately 5 to 7 generations (assuming around 25-30 years per generation).
Family Size in the 19th Century: In the U.S. in the mid-1800s, the average woman had 6 or 7 children, though only some would survive into adulthood. The high fertility rate was partly a response to high infant mortality rates.
Exponential Growth: Even with high childhood mortality rates, if we assume a typical family size that sustains the line (e.g., at least 2 surviving children per generation), the number of descendants can grow exponentially in theory.
Variable Outcomes: The number is a vast range because some family lines die out completely (Abraham Lincoln, for example, has zero living descendants). In other cases, large families combined with subsequent generations also having several children can lead to hundreds or thousands of descendants across many branches of a family tree.
Pedigree Collapse: The number of unique ancestors you have going back in time is much lower than the theoretical maximum because of shared ancestors (e.g., cousins marrying), which means the number of descendants can also be less than a simple exponential calculation would suggest.
Using a random figure of, say, 300 descendants of each of those 38 victims, we get 11,400 X $100,000 X 38+ $1,140,000,000. And that’s not counting $10,000 to be paid to each black resident who had a great-great-great-great-great-greate grandfather - or mother — who lived in the general “affected” community in 1865. So how many of those are there? A million? Two million? At $10,000 per, that’s another $10 or $20 Bn. Wow!
Maryland high schools graduates boast a numerical literacy rate of 11%; 98% of Baltimore’s residents are on drugs. Just sayin’.
Maybe Maryland can borrow the money from Minnesota.
UPDATE:
Baltimore City Schools: Where Failure Gets Rewarded
…. Back in 2021, local station WBFF learned about a student enrolled in a local high school who had passed a total of three high school classes in four years. His GPA was 0.13 and he should have technically still been a freshman despite being passed along each year and promoted to being a senior.
But the really shocking part of the story was that his GPA meant he was ranked 62nd out of 120 students in his grade. In other words, a 0.13 GPA was the middle of the pack. Fully half the students in his grade had lower GPAs.
How is that possible? Well, further investigation by WBFF revealed there were more than 900 "ghost students" enrolled at this school. They were kept on the rolls even though many of them never showed up for class. The school system apparently did this because schools get paid per student who attends. So the cost of these ghost students to the taxpayers was nearly $10 million.
…. In 2023 the same station revealed that Baltimore County's math scores were the lowest in the state. In fact, there were 23 schools where not a single student could do math at grade level. Overall, only 7% of students in grades 3-8 were deemed proficient.”
(The woman in charge here, Dr. Sonja Santelises, is paid a $445,000 salary, plus perks, and is one of four finalist for the National Superintendent of the Year award as determined by The School Superintendents Association.)