Reparation Payments
When a friend emailed the lead headline, I thought it was satire. It’s not.
Please consider San Francisco Board of Supervisors Unanimously Supports Reparation Payments by Jonathan Turley.
We have been following the recommendations of reparations for black residents of San Francisco, including a proposed payment of $5 million per resident payment. The Board of Supervisors met Tuesday and reportedly gave unanimous support for reparations. Among the possible forms of reparations, the Board is considering a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for 250 years and a home “for just $1 a family.”
The city council voted unanimously to create the reparations committee in 2020. The African American Reparations Advisory Committee voted to give $5 million to each eligible Black resident as reparations.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) created his own Reparations Task Force, which just reached its own recommendations for $223,000 per person. Others have insisted the figure should be $350,000 for individuals and another $250,000 for Black-owned businesses. One California politician insisted the figure needs to be $800,000 per person, reflecting the average cost of a home in the state.
The Board notably did not approve the proposed $5 million payments and some members issued statements that bordered on the incomprehensible. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman spoke to “those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody’s collective future.”
Virtue signaling has ended with the formal proposal. If the Board was not playing black voters by dangling the possibility of reparations, it can now prove its commitment by approving these payments. Of course, it would likely bankrupt the city, but that was not a concern when people like Mandelman were declaring their support for reparations. After all, if this is a moral imperative, it would seem that the “future” can’t wait for Mandelman and his colleagues.
The city created the reparation panel in 2020.
It made a recommendation in March.
On March 15, 2023, Fox News reported Some San Francisco residents may receive $5 million in reparations after Board expresses ‘unanimous’ support
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors met Tuesday in official discussions on reparations, with $5 million payments on the table for every eligible Black adult in the city.
The board expressed “unanimous” support for reparations during the meeting, even after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution calculated that the proposal would cost non-Black families in the city at least $600,000.
“There wasn’t a math formula,” San Francisco’s chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, Eric McDonnell, reportedly told The Washington Post. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”
The proposal continued: “A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by city policy.”
There was “unanimous support” for the proposal, yet it did not pass.
It’s not even constitutional according to Jonathan Turley in an Article on The Hill
Under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, race-based classifications trigger strict scrutiny requiring a showing of both a “compelling state interest” and “narrowly tailored” means. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989), the Supreme Court struck down a set-aside for minority businesses due to a lack of evidence of specific injuries. The court ruled that general past discrimination was not enough and added that “the dream of a Nation of equal citizens in a society where race is irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement would be lost in a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs.”
Statewide Cost
The cost of California’s statewide reparations is estimated to be $569 billion. The state’s annual budget is roughly half that amount, at $268 billion. Making things even more difficult, the state faces a $22.5 billion deficit and is seeking spending cuts to cover the shortfall.
San Francisco Cost
If San Francisco does it alone Stanford University’s Hoover Institution calculated that the proposal would cost non-Black families in the city at least $600,000.
Point2Homes says “there are a total of 361,222 households in San Francisco.”
The price tag is $192,733,200,000 from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves in a state that never had slaves.
By the way, the annual San Francisco budget is $13 billion. The reparations would be about 15 times the annual budget.
And allegedly this would make things fair.
If the board actually approved this nonsense, I suspect everyone who voted in favor would immediately be voted out of office in special elections and the bill would be quickly struck down as unconstitutional.
Thus, it’s too bad it did not pass.
By the way, am I mistaken or is the city seal racist and sexist? I see no people of color nor any women.
This post originated at MishTalk.Com.
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Mish
prison wardens to play a role in producing poverty in America,” Desmond
goes on. “We need only to vote yes on policies that lead to private
opulence and public squalor and, with that opulence, build a life behind
a wall that we tend and maintain.”
Rachel Dolezal was ahead of her time.
Dans une village des Irréductibles Gaulois.
Comrade Putin shot all potato at Ukraine when shells ran out. No potato for you!