Account: United States of America
Estimated in 2025 dollars. The principal was never paid — and the interest is still accruing.
The labor that was taken.
Value every hour at a fair wage. Then let the debt earn interest.
Like any unpaid wage, the sum compounds. Carried forward from 1865 at a conservative rate of interest, the back pay owed for stolen labor climbs steeply, and by one conservative estimate lands beyond $20 trillion.
By 1860, enslaved people were the largest American asset apart from land.
At roughly $3 billion, the enslaved were valued as property at more than all the nation’s railroads, banks, and factories combined, around a sixth to a fifth of all American wealth. Compounding the income their owners diverted yields $5–12 trillion.
Three independent methods. One range.
Approached three different ways, the estimates land in a similar band, roughly $12–17 trillion, with $14 trillion as a midpoint working figure.
Eligible: descendants of people enslaved in the United States — not all Black Americans.
This bill has a precedent. It was paid — to the wrong people.
The debt did not disappear. It compounded.