The San Francisco Reparations Committee has recommended payouts of $5 million to each eligible black resident of the city, despite the fact that slavery never existed there.
Now the Reparations Committee has had an opportunity to present their recommendations to the city’s Board of Supervisors, and they think it’s a great idea.
The Associated Press reports:
San Francisco board open to reparations with $5M payoutsPayments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, 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.These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism. And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware 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.“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,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the heavily LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.The draft reparations plan, released in December, is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth. The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, has said it would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.
This isn’t based on math or history. It’s all about feelings and social justice.
FOX News reports:
An estimated 50,000 Black people live in San Francisco, but it’s unclear who among them would be eligible for reparations. Under the committee’s draft reparations plan, a person must be at least 18 years old and identified as “Black/African American” in public documents for at least 10 years. Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, such as living in San Francisco during a certain time period or descending from someone incarcerated for the police war on drugs.Regardless of what the criteria might ultimately become, several board members have expressed concerns about how large lump-sum payments would impact the city’s budget, which is already facing a massive estimated deficit of $728 million.”There wasn’t a math formula,” Eric McDonnell, chair of the reparations committee, recently told the Washington Post, describing the process of coming to its $5 million per person recommendation. “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.”
Would it be worth it to watch the city of San Francisco bankrupt itself?
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