Next year, California is facing a $25 billion budget deficit, businesses are fleeing, and the big cities are swamped with seas of drug-addled homeless people. None of that has stopped the reparations committee that Governor Gavin Newsom convened from thinking big when it comes to reparations for Blacks in that state. The current proposal envisions giving each of California’s 2.5 million self-identified Black Americans $223,200 (totaling $559 Billion) for “housing discrimination.”

California has long had a problem when it comes to the whole reparations theory: It never had slavery. It’s true that a lot of Gold Rush money went to the Confederacy, but that was never California’s official policy. How can a state virtue signal if it wasn’t a slave state? The answer, it turns out, is to point to housing discrimination:

A reparations committee in California has suggested that descendants of slaves in the state could be compensated $223,200 each for ‘housing discrimination’.

The nine-member Reparations Task Force was formed by California Governor Gavin Newsom as part of the country’s largest ever effort to address reparations for slavery.

A focus of the California task force has been ‘housing discrimination’ - it has been estimated that it would cost around $569billion to compensate the 2.5 million Black Californians for setbacks between 1933 and 1977, according to the New York Times.

That is more than California’s $512.8billion expenditure in 2021 - which included funding for schools, hospitals, universities, highways, policing and corrections.

Image: Reparations by Daniel Lobo. Public domain.

There are lots of problems with this $559 billion plan. Here are just the most obvious:

• Much of California’s housing discrimination was due to CC&Rs that prohibited selling property in a given subdivision to Blacks. This was not a state matter, so taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for it. The eminent domain examples given occurred as long as a century ago. We also have no evidence of reparations for other people (Asians, Jews, etc.) who also experienced that type of discrimination, something that would offset the state’s obligation solely to Blacks.
• Blacks may find themselves in less desirable communities for reasons other than government action.
• California has actively discriminated against other races, most notably against Asians. Once you start paying reparations, where does it stop?
• Because any discrimination complained of last occurred in 1977, by which time it was already illegal and so almost certainly minimal, and because California’s population has almost doubled in that time, the cost of the proposed payments will be imposed on people who were not responsible for the discrimination, nor did they directly benefit from it. In the case of WWII reparations, the money came from people who committed the heinous acts and went to people whom those acts directly victimized.
• Because it’s impossible to tell whether a 20-something Black person whose family came here from Indiana in 1960 suffered from state-sponsored discrimination, it’s a pure windfall for that person. The same is true for someone who is descended from myriad races but “identifies” as Black. Thus, there’s no way to tell whether Black people who are not affluent are suffering from decades-old eminent domain policies or for other reasons.
• Blacks, in California and out of it, have already received trillions of dollars in reparations via welfare (which was sold as reparations to Black men in the 1960s who were loath to receive charity), affirmative action, racial preferences, etc.

Looking at all those money transfers over the past 50-plus years, there’s no evidence that they improved life for Black Americans. Indeed, it was before those transfer payments began that Blacks had their swiftest economic ascent. The booming post-WWII economy, combined with Americans’ dawning understanding that Jim Crow and other acts of racism were morally reprehensible, gave Blacks real opportunities. And because Marxism hadn’t yet infected them by making them view themselves as victims, they seized those opportunities to become masters of their fates.

The whole reparations idea is silly and self-defeating. However, California politicians, whom the voters seem to want, are committed to virtue-signaling, so they’re going to do something. Moreover, given that California is already a sinking ship with its insane green policies (no more gasoline-powered cars, no more natural gas furnaces for new homes), a growing deficit, sanctuary state policies, child exploitation, unlimited abortion, and fleeing tax-paying population, taking on more water in the form of reparations debt won’t change things; it will just accelerate them.