Atoning and satisfying a wrong or damage with monetary awards is a dictionary definition of “reparation.”
The dictionary, however, doesn’t identify who the villains and victims are. That is just one of the major hurdles a reparations panel in California has to clear. Another is “Where would the money come from?”
Generations ago, enslaving a person in the United States was legal. That ended in 1863. People in 2023 want to be awarded damages for the sins of the past.
Sixty-eight percent of the American public is against paying reparations. But nearly half of Democrats agree that slavery reparations should be paid, according to Pew Research.
Democrat-laden California, which was technically a “free state” during the era of slavery, has just adopted recommendations that may award each Black person $1.2 million as compensation for slavery and other injustices.
California taxpayers might shell out as much as $800 billion if this bill passes.
With such a large sum at stake, the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee must have spent considerable time and effort developing and using a mathematical formula to arrive at $1.2 million per individual. But that is not the case. The panel did no such calculations.
The head of the committee, Eric McDonnel,l admitted that it was merely a number that sounded good, not a “math formula.”
He said it was a journey for the committee toward what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on a path to economic well-being, vitality, and the growth that slavery destroyed.
The scheme’s success is predicated upon the same answer to every left-wing pie-in-the-sky notion— tax the rich.
San Francisco’s budget deficit for the next two fiscal years is around $728 million. Finding $800 billion will not be possible without irreparable damage done to future taxpayers.
Atoning for the sins of the past by punishing people in the future seems like, math aside, a poorly drafted plan.
