Gov. Newsom’s panel recommends $800 billion in ‘reparations.’
No progressive idea is too wild to be adopted these days, especially in California. The latest example is the Golden State’s new plan to redistribute hundreds of billions of dollars as racial “reparations.”
A nine-member committee created by Gov. Gavin Newsom and his Democratic Legislature voted Saturday to recommend that the state make cash payments to black Americans who claim to be descendants of slaves. Although California’s 1849 Constitution banned slavery, the committee claims the state government was complicit in the enslavement of blacks in southern states.
The committee says blacks are still suffering the lingering effects of slavery, as well as from such policies as “overpolicing.” The panel recommends payments of $2,352 for each year slavery descendants lived in California during its “war on drugs” from 1971 to 2020. The war apparently ended when localities stopped enforcing drug laws during the pandemic.
Slavery descendants would also get $3,366 for each year they lived in the state between 1933 and 1977 when housing discrimination allegedly occurred, as well as $13,619 for each year they were a California resident to compensate for health disparities between blacks and whites. All told, as many as two million black Californians could be eligible, and the total cost could be as much as $1.2 million a person and $800 billion overall.
As always with racial spoils, the committee makes some arbitrary distinctions. Black immigrants need not apply. Nor Japanese Americans whose ancestors were put in camps during World War II. Nor Chinese Americans who worked on the intercontinental railroad but were also barred by the Chinese Exclusion Act. And don’t forget Native Americans who were pushed off their land by settlers.
The restriction to slavery descendants looks like an attempt to overcome likely legal challenges. The Constitution’s equal protection clause prohibits government policies that discriminate based on broad racial classifications, but federal courts have upheld narrowly tailored policies to remedy past discrimination.
But how are reparations for “over-policing” narrowly-tailored? And how would the state confirm who is a descendant of a slave? Under the committee’s plan, a special agency would determine eligibility based on genealogical research. With so much cash at stake, imagine the litigation that will ensue.
The committee also recommends that the state adopt a laundry list of leftwing policies to remedy racial disparities. These include rent control in minority neighborhoods, free college and a guaranteed income for slavery descendants, and single-payer health care. Oh, and repeal a 1996 state constitutional amendment that banned racial preferences, which voters reaffirmed in a 2020 referendum.
Slavery was a scourge, and so was Jim Crow. But the U.S. has done decades of penance to ameliorate their damage, including spending trillions of dollars in social-welfare programs. One moral question is why Americans who played no part in either slavery or Jim Crow should pay for the sins of the past.
Should the descendants of Union soldiers killed in the Civil War that ended slavery be exempt from paying taxes for reparations because of the sacrifice of their ancestors? Accounting for the moral wrongs of the past is a fraught issue best left to the teaching of history, if they still teach that in California schools.
If the reparations committee wants to make amends for bad policy, we have other suggestions. Start with teacher tenure protections and last-in-first-out dismissal policies that disproportionately harm minority kids in low-income schools, as demonstrated by the Vergara lawsuit a decade ago. Lack of school choice imprisons black children in failing urban schools.
Zoning restrictions inflate housing costs, making it harder for minorities to move to suburbs with better schools. The state’s de facto decriminalization of drug use and shoplifting in 2014 has led to increased crime, especially in minority neighborhoods. The state’s war on fossil fuels is killing good-paying working-class jobs and raising energy prices. But these are progressive policies that increase racial and income disparities, so they’re off the reparations list.
If you think reparations are so outrageous that they will never become law, you haven’t been watching the trend of ideas in the Democratic Party. Don’t be surprised if reparations become a new progressive litmus test.
