Study Finds Racism In America Has Cost Taxpayers $16 Trillion

Via America’s Lawyer: RT Correspondent Brigida Santos joins Mike Papantonio to discuss a Citigroup report which estimates that systemic racism has cost Black Americans $16 trillion over the past 20 years.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A new report by Citigroup concludes the racism against African-Americans has cost the US $16 trillion over the past 20 years. Brigida Santos is here to talk to me and break this down. You know, Brigida, I saw Rick Sanchez did a story very similar to this on the Hispanic part of this, how the Hispanic community brings so much to our economy and how we're doing everything we can maybe to interfere with that natural progress. How does this study quantify the economic impact of systemic racism?

Well, researchers measured four key racial gaps for black Americans, including wages, education, housing and investment. And they concluded that if these key racial gaps had been closed two decades ago, $16 trillion could have been added to the US economy. Now, according to researchers, facilitating easy access to higher education for black students would have increased the lifetime incomes by $90 to $113 billion. Providing fair and equitable lending to black entrepreneurs would have resulted in an estimated $13 trillion in business revenue and created over 6 million jobs every year. Improving access to housing credit would have resulted in an additional 770,000 black homeowners and added $218 billion in sales and expenditures and closing the black wage gap would have added nearly $3 trillion in income. Now, the researchers say that if these racial gaps are closed today, it's not too late. The US can gain $5 trillion of additional GDP over the next five years. So basically this study finds that racism is expensive and inclusion is financially beneficial for the nation.

Yeah, I'd say, as I was saying, Rick Sanchez did a great report on this the other day, and it is the same thing with the Hispanic community. So I guess, what can we do to close that racial gap between black and white or Caucasian and Hispanic? What, what do we do? What can the average American do, if this, if these numbers are right and I don't have any reason to believe they're not, if this, if this study is not driven by a, some type of agenda, which I have no reason to believe it is. What can we do?

Sure. The researchers outlined several key actions to help reduce the racial gap. Now at the government level actions like implementing tax reforms, promoting financial inclusion, decoupling healthcare from employment, implementing housing incentives, investing in wealth building and creating better protections against discrimination are a start. And at the corporate level companies can support diversity and inclusion initiatives from the top, recruit more people of color to corporate boards and dismantle structural barriers to hiring people of different ethnicities. Citigroup says it's now going to invest $550 million in programs that encourage home ownership for people of color and has also promised to dump $50 million into capital investments for black entrepreneurs. So again, this is just a start, there's a long way to go. And this is looking at the black community, as you mentioned, there are other ethnic communities that are also costing the, the US money.

Yeah, well, I mean, we, we have comparatives don't we, we can look at other countries. We can look at other settings and see whether this is, whether this is accurate, first of all, whether it's a viable argument. You know, Citigroup, even though every other month or so, we see, we see them in the news for doing some awful. This is a very, this is a very good move for them. Racism in policing is also costing the US, the Taylor case, we, we look at civil lawsuits, we look at civil lawsuits against the city. We look at civil lawsuits against the state. I mean, so there's something very tangible here. How much did the city have to pay?

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