We come now to the Reparations task force’s section called “Methodologies for calculating compensation and forms of compensation and restitution.” Of course, it was always taken for granted by the members of the task force that huge amounts of money would be transferred from government and the public-at-large to the Black community. The question was simply, how much, and in what form?
It’s true that the task force members understood the complexity of the issues. They repeatedly stress that their numbers are “preliminary estimates for the Legislature’s consideration, regarding losses to African-Americans in California.” Meaning, of course, that they’ll continue to discover more reasons for much higher cash payments in the future.
There’s a notable difference in life expectancy between Black people and non-Hispanic White people, and the task force blames this on racism. By a complex formula, they determined that every Black person in California is entitled to $13,619 for “each year spent in California” due to this discrepancy. Thus, a Black man who was born here and is now 70 would be entitled to $953,330.
Then the task force calculated the financial costs of “mass incarceration and over-policing of African Americans” and determined that an additional $115,260 per person is owed. This, in addition to providing Black Californians with the legal right to sue for compensation for their time in prison for cannabis and other drugs now legal.
By another extraordinarily complicated formula concerning “housing discrimination,” the task force discovered that Black Californians are due an additional $161,508 each. To that, you can add another $77,000 “per African American in California” due to the “devaluation of African American businesses.”
All this adds up to a great deal of money, but the task force emphasizes that “this list of harms and atrocities is not exhaustive,” but is an “economically conservative initial assessment” that “further data collection” would naturally cause to rise. Additional causes of monetary reparations, the task force stresses, could be “pain and suffering from generations of suffering”—and as we know, awards for pain and suffering can be among the highest of all in compensatory judicial proceedings.
I think it’s clear that the task force members took their job seriously and literally, but failed to take political and financial realities into account. Clearly there’s not enough money in California’s treasury to realize all their recommendations. And this, as I previously stressed, doesn’t even take into account the other reparations schemes, at the county and city level—for example, San Francisco’s suggestion 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.”
A modest reader of these proposals might justifiably conclude that these reparations task forces have been smoking something that makes them high and giddy. Clearly they’re swinging for the fences and hoping to hit at least a double. We’ll have to wait for further developments, but in the meantime, I ask readers to consider if they agree with these massive payouts and, if they do, what they propose to cut for our municipal budgets in order to pay for them. You can start with significant, perhaps fatal hits to police, firefighters, road repairs, park maintenance, and EMT services. If and when the public has to choose between basic city services, on the one hand, and reparations, on the other, I have no doubt what their choice will be.
Steve Heimoff