The Democrat mayors of 11 U.S. cities have agreed to set up some sort of reparations payment for (some?) black residents of their cities. Apparently, that’s as far as the plan has gone, however, as there is no report on who will pay, who will be paid, how these two things will be determined, or pretty much anything else.
The 11 mayors, who are shilling their plan as Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE), are:
Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, California
Michael Hancock of Denver, Colorado
Tishaura Jones of St. Louis, Missouri
Jorge Elorza of Providence, Rhode Island
Steve Adler of Austin, Texas
Steve Schewel of Durham, North Carolina
Esther Manheimer of Asheville, North Carolina
Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Missouri
Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento, California
Melvin Carter of St. Paul, Minnesota
Keisha Currin of Tullahassee, Oklahoma
Eleven U.S. mayors — from Los Angeles to tiny Tullahassee, Oklahoma — have pledged to pay reparations for slavery to a small group of Black residents in their cities, saying their aim is to set an example for the federal government on how a nationwide program could work.The mayors had no details on how much it would cost, who would pay for it or how people would be chosen. All of those details would be worked out with the help of local commissions comprised of representatives from Black-led organizations set up to advise the mayor of each city. But the mayors say they are committed to paying reparations instead of just talking about them.“Black Americans don’t need another study that sits on a shelf,” said St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, the city’s first Black female mayor and a member of the group. “We need decisive action to address the racial wealth gap holding communities back across our country.”Tullahassee — a small town of fewer than 200 people in northeast Oklahoma — is the oldest of the surviving all-Black towns in the states that were founded after the U.S. abolished slavery. Many of the first Black people to live there had been enslaved by Native American tribes that had allied with the Confederacy during the Civil War.
I’m guessing that descendants of these Native American slave holders will not be expected to chip in for their part in “systemic racism” and “white supremacy,” but color me cynical.
Honestly, I would be fine with cities choosing to pay reparations if the mayors and their cities’ voters are on board and want to do it. However, the stated goal of the program and announcement is to put pressure on the U.S. government to redistribute wealth on the basis of race.
WPRI continues:
This group of mayors, dubbed Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity (MORE), is led by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. Their stated goal is for these reparations programs to “serve as high-profile demonstrations for how the country can more quickly move from conversation to action on reparations for Black Americans,” according to the group’s website.“Let me be clear: Cities will never have the funds to pay for reparations on our own,” Garcetti said during a news conference on Friday to announce the group. “When we have the laboratories of cities show that there is much more to embrace than to fear, we know that we can inspire national action as well.”
If it’s true—and it is—that these 11 cities “will never have the funds to pay for reparations on our own,” what’s the point?
Essentially,this MORE venture is little more than virtue signalling with the goal of “inspiring” and “nudging” the federal government to step in and lavish taxpayer dollars on a national reparations scheme.
For some reason that I have never been able to fathom, Democrats can’t seem to grasp that if “cities will never have the funds to pay for reparations” on a small scale, then the federal government surely doesn’t and will never have the funds on a far larger scale.
This is in the same vein of the infamous Obama-era “Solyndra logic” that went something like this: sure, we’re losing money on every unit sold, but we’ll make it up in bulk!
Setting aside the many compelling arguments against reparations, there is one glaring problem here. If Garcetti’s Los Angeles, one of the largest and wealthiest cities in America with a gross metropolitan product of $1 trillion, can “never have the funds to pay for reparations on our own” for only its own city’s qualifying black residents, there is no way on earth the entire U.S. can do so.
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