The liberal city of San Francisco is planning to hand out around $50 billion dollars as reparations. Each eligible citizen will be getting a lump sum payment of $5 million. It will be interesting to see how they manage to come up with that mountain of cash. Especially, when their entire city budget is only $14 billion and they’re having trouble raising that.
Reparations checks $5 million each
The committee studying promised “reparations” to Black citizens of San Francisco, California, has come to the conclusion that a check for $5 million each would be fair.
“Each eligible African-American inhabitant of the city” will get a check to make up for the “decades of harm they have experienced.” The news was released on Monday, January 16, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. day.
“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population,” the reparations committee reports.
San Francisco’s reparations committee proposes $5,000,000 to each Black longtime resident + debt forgiveness.
Applicants must be 18 & have identified as Black or African American on public documents for 10 yrs. “Canceling debt gives Black people an opportunity to build wealth.” pic.twitter.com/Kwt7rinuXD— Black Millionaires ® (@Blackmillions_) January 17, 2023
That “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.” Even though they never embraced slavery.
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee issued their draft report last month and it’s been raising eyebrows ever since. They also kicked around “wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households.”
The committee is thrilled with their recommendation while, at the same time, they don’t have a care in the world how it will be funded. That’s not their problem.
Proportional to the violations
San Francisco’s board of supervisors set up the city’s reparations board back in May of 2021 and the idea was picked up by the state. California’s legislature is also studying the issue.
The city ultimately determined that “reparation must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.” They’re also quick to point out they aren’t trying to “remedy enslavement.” That’s because California didn’t have any.
Instead, they want to pay reparations for “the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”
San Francisco reparations committee proposes $5 million to each long term Black resident and will grant total debt forgiveness due to the decades of “systematic repression” pic.twitter.com/OL6elhyDkZ
— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) January 17, 2023
The war on drugs for instance. If you’re Black, and you or any of your ancestors were jailed for a drug offense, you get a check for $5 million. No questions asked. They’ll even direct deposit it to your bank for you.
The report spells it out. “While neither California nor San Francisco formally adopted the institution of ‘chattel slavery,’ other aspects of segregation like white supremacy and ‘systematic repression‘ found in the legal system, ‘social codes‘ and ‘extralegal actions‘ were designed to exclude blacks.” To be eligible for reparations, “applicants must be 18 and show they have identified as black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years.”
They also have to “prove that they meet two out of eight additional standards — including being born in or having migrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, and having proof of residency for at least 13 years, being personally or a direct descendant or someone jailed in the ‘failed War on Drugs,’ or being a descendant of someone enslaved before 1865.“