In January, a San Francisco panel studying reparations for slavery came up with an ambitious proposal — a lump sum of payment of $5 million to every eligible black American in the City by the Bay.
And that was just the start. The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee also proposed the elimination of all personal debt, guaranteed income of $97000 for black residents for 250 years, and providing homes for black residents at a price of $1 each, libertarian writer Kristin Tate wrote in an April commentary in The Hill.
The cost to the city for this fantastical plan was estimated at $175 billion for the $5 million payouts alone, without taking into account the other add-ons. That amount is bigger than the entire annual budgets of 47 of the 50 U.S. states, The Hill reported.
When asked if the $5 million per person number was too large for a city to handle, committee Supervisor Shamann Walton said that it was just the opposite.
“You can Google a lot of the work of the reparations that has been done and look at the monetary formulas that people have put together, and most certainly, the $5 million is a very minuscule number compared to a lot of research that has been done over the past couple of decades, quite frankly,” Walton said, according to a National Review report published Saturday.
But, in a hilarious turn of events, the “entitlement committee,” as it should have been called, has other things to worry about. Forget about reparations — the city has no money to even fund the committee itself.
Budget Deficit in San Francisco Forces City to Eliminate ‘Office of Reparations’ https://t.co/8sUarod8a4
— LeoTerrell (@TheLeoTerrell) December 16, 2023
Surely they’ll issue IOU’s. 🤔
— skiguy (@skiguy14) December 16, 2023
Are reparations for slavery a bad idea?
According to a San Francisco Examiner report from Dec. 5, funding for the troubled city’s first-ever Office of Reparations has been eliminated by Mayor London Breed as part of $75 million in cuts to the city budget.
Walton had originally requested $50 million to establish the Office of Reparations in San Francisco’s budget, the Examiner reported.
The request was then reduced to $10 million.
The committee finally secured $2 million to fund and hire staff.
However, that $2 million has now been eliminated not only for this year but the next two budget years as well.
Walton, who fought to secure funding for the office, called the cuts “disheartening” but did not dispute the need for reductions given the fact that San Francisco is dealing with a major budget deficit, the Examiner reported.
Other planned programs have also lost funding due to Breed’s $75 million in cuts across the board.
The committee says work will continue on some recommendations from the reparations plan, such as bringing a satellite campus of a historically historically black college to San Francisco.
However, according to Walton, that $5 million per black person is only delayed.
“My hope is that the city’s deficit is eliminated quickly so that we can fund the Office of Reparations and fulfill the commitment made to address the historical injustices and inequities that have persisted for generations for black San Franciscans,” Walton told the Examiner.
Walton did not mention that the projected budget deficit for San Francisco will increase to $1 billion by 2027, according to the Examiner.
What are they doing anyway but sowing false expectations?
— AmyAnn (@AmyAnn19692783) December 16, 2023
Either Walton is a candidate for a trip down the rabbit hole to Alice’s wonderland, or he is aware that his demands can never be satisfied by a city dealing with much more real-world issues like homelessness and rampant crime.
But as long as he can keep convincing San Francisco’s black population — about 5 percent of the city in 2022, according to the Census Bureau — that they just might win the $5 million reparation lottery someday, they will keep voting Democrat — just in case.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what this is all about?
