San Francisco is poised on the verge of passing out reparations checks of $5 million to each qualified “eligible Black adult” in the city. They don’t have final approval yet but the city is expected to vote it in any time now. They don’t care how much it costs.
Reparations under consideration
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors held a hearing Tuesday to review the report on reparations prepared by a special committee appointed for the purpose. The exploratory panel kicked around over 100 separate ideas but the one gaining the most traction is the payment “of $5 million to every eligible Black adult.”
Other top contenders were “the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.”
It’s a “thorny” question, the city-appointed reparations committee admits. They were tasked with figuring out “how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism.” That’s even more difficult because California never had slaves.
So the black community in California has figured out the ONE THING that is going to stop their kids from stealing. No, not better parenting. REPARATIONS, of course! pic.twitter.com/7Kg5zVAP95
— Joe Has Dementia (@RokerGlasses) March 4, 2023
The Board of Supervisors were thrilled with the results the committee came up with and “voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed.” Critics, who asked where the money would come from to do it, were simply ignored. Money, the supervisors scold, “should not stop the city from doing the right thing.”
Several supervisors were shocked “to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans.” Not all progressives, it seems, are aware “that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.”
A big fat reparations check is the only possible answer for that. Nobody with $5 million in the bank sticks up a liquor store.
Constituents who lost their minds
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman vocalized what was on the minds of many. “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.” “Their” district “includes the heavily LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.”
The plan for reparations was revealed in December but wasn’t officially presented to the Supervisors for final consideration until now. The only debate is which of the proposals to accept.
They have intentionally kept money out of the decision making process. “The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible.”
Newsom's California pushes billions in reparations payments as state faces budget deficit disaster https://t.co/sUdXY1eOKU
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 14, 2023
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, estimates that reparations “would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.” The most noteworthy part of the whole meeting was that nobody in a decision making role was opposed to the general plan.
The $5 million checks could be augmented by some of the other proposals. They’re still picking and choosing their favorite goodies like off a Chinese restaurant menu.
“Tuesday’s unanimous expressions of support for reparations by the board do not mean all the recommendations will ultimately be adopted, as the body can vote to approve, reject or change any or all of them.” A final committee report is due in June.
