The BIG LAUGH of the Day: San Francisco Official Says $5 Million Reparations for Black Residents Not Enough; San Francisco Reparations Proposal Could Cost City North of $100 Billion

$5 million reparations for black residents not enough, San Francisco official says

A city official from San Francisco , California, said the draft plan for black residents to receive $5 million in reparations is not enough for proper compensation.

Supervisor Shamann Walton told National Review Tuesday the 5 million number, which the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee said would remedy previous discrimination against black city residents, is “much less than a lot of the projections that people say black people should receive for reparations here in the United States.”

“You can Google a lot of the reparations work 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 to the outlet.

Walton, who introduced the resolution to explore reparations in February 2020, defended the potential payments, saying that past discrimination by the city and state has put black families at a disadvantage.

“In San Francisco, black families were not allowed to be taught, but we still had to pay taxes for the education of white children. I would say that black neighborhoods and communities were created here in San Francisco without the benefit of representation. I would say that there were racial restrictions indoctrinated in city policy that said black people couldn’t buy or lease property,” Walton said.

California was not a slave state when slavery was legal in the United States before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. —>READ MORE HERE

San Francisco Reparations Proposal Could Cost City North of $100 Billion:

An advisory committee’s recommendation that San Francisco pay out hefty reparations to longtime black residents could cost the city at least $110 billion, at even a conservative estimate.

The advisory committee released a draft report last month proposing the city make a lump sum payment of $5 million to black residents who are at least 18 and have identified as black or African American on public documents for at least ten years. Residents must also meet at least two of eight other requirements. Among those requirements is that the resident is “personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs” or is a “Descendant of someone enslaved through US chattel slavery before 1865.”

“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy,” the committee said.

The group is set to submit its final proposal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in June.

If even just 50 percent of the city’s nearly 45,000 black residents met the requirements for the proposed payments, the city would be staring down a $112.5 billion bill. For comparison, San Francisco’s entire budget for fiscal year 2022–2023 is just $14 billion. The budget for the entire state is $308 billion.

And that’s without considering some of the other proposals included in the report, such as that the city supplement lower-earning recipients’ incomes to meet the area median income (AMI) of about $97,000, for at least 250 years. Another recommendation was to create “a comprehensive debt forgiveness program” for black residents to cancel student loans, housing loans, and credit-card debt in an effort to give “Black households an opportunity to build wealth.”

If every black resident qualified for the $5 million payment, the city would be on the hook for $223 billion — a cost of $263,000 for every non-black person in San Francisco, according to Steven F. Hayward, a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. —>READ MORE HERE

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