California Wants “Reparations Down Payment” for Black People

(RepublicanNews.org) – More than 150 years after slavery ended in the U.S., a California task force wants to pay black residents “down payments” on what it says will be a total bill of $800 billion for “reparations.”

That figure is equivalent to three years’ worth of California’s total budget spending. 

The reparations task force, put in place by Democrat Gavin Newsom, also says the state should “apologize” for slavery. California has never had slavery. The state outlawed the practice when it joined the Union in 1850. 

The task force has so far produced more than 500 pages of documents about its planned “reparations” action, how much it wants to disburse, and who it wants the money to go to. These include detailed estimates of how much the task force believes individual black people  have “lost” due to “racism.”

For example, the group believes black Californians lose $2,352 each year because black neighborhoods are over-policed. Blacks also lose an additional $3,366 for every year they live in California because of unfair lending and municipal zoning, the group says. Then, add another $13,619 “lost” per person for “injustices and discrimination in health.” The biggest annual loss, says the panel, is the final $77,00 per person because black-owned businesses have losses or are “de-valued.”

The reparations group doesn’t want to stop there. It would also like to abolish cash bail. This means that more suspected criminals would be freed from jail before trial. 

The reparations task force talked with five economists and “policy experts” to arrive at the $800 billion figure supposedly owed by California taxpayers to black residents. But, the task force said, that didn’t even include amounts for the property that was allegedly “taken” from black people or the amount by which black businesses are allegedly “devalued.

It is not clear what the task force means by “taken” or “devalued.”

The reparations money would be overseen by a newly created state agency, that task force said. 

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