California Proposal For Slavery Reparations

This has been a background newes item for some time, but a California panel has been studying the issue of reparations for slavery:

In October 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed Bill AB 3121 into law — creating the nation’s first ever task force to study and recommend reparations for slavery.

This past Saturday, it issued a predictable set of recommendations:

California's reparations task force voted Saturday to approve recommendations on how the state may compensate and apologize to Black residents for generations of harm caused by discriminatory policies.

The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, gave final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of proposals that now go to state lawmakers to consider for reparations legislation.

. . . Some estimates from economists have projected that the state could owe upwards of $800 billion, or more than 2.5 times its annual budget, in reparations to Black people.

California entered the Union in 1850 as a free state, so slavery was never legal here throughout its history as a US state. However, the panel determined that various other forms of discrimination made African-Americans eligible for reparations according to complicated formulas.

The panel's recommendation breaks payments down by types of historical discrimination. For instance, Black residents affected by redlining by banks would receive $3,366 for each year they lived in California from the early 1930s to the late 1970s, amounting to up to $148,099.

Similarly, Black residents could receive roughly $2,352 in compensation for over-policing and mass incarceration for each year they lived in California between 1970 and 2020. Those payments could amount to $115,260.

In total, from these and other payments included in the plan, a Black Californian who is 71 years old and has lived in California his entire life could receive up to $1.2 million, according to analysis from the New York Times.

For now, I want to leave questions of whether such reparations are moral or constitutional completely aside and consider the single issue of how the reparations would be financed. I've got to assume there would need to be some type of tax levy on California residents to pay for this, whatever the cost, even if as some claim the $800 billion estimate is too high, and it might be done for less.

One question would be who would have to pay whatever tax was imposed to pay reparations to African-Americans. Normally if the legislature imposes a tax, every taxpayer must pay it according to income. But if the tax is imposed as a reparation for injustices against African-Americans, why should African-Americans have to pay the tax? Isn't that unfair?

That means there would need to be a set of criteria that would entitle certain people identifiable as African-Americans not only to receive reparation payments, but also to exempt them from being taxed to pay for the reparations.

But then we have a whole separate question of what this could do to those who must pay the tax, which would be not just white people, but Asians and Latins. Wouldn't this be an enormous incentive to drive non-African-Americas out of the state? Such a tax would place a non-trivial burden on possibly 85% or more of the state's residents, which they could escape by simply moving away.

I have no idea where this is headed, but it's hard to avoid thinking the state's political establishment, including a Democrat supermajority in the legislature, is edging toward a proposal that would involve race-based payments, financed by a race-based tax on perhaps 85% of the state's residents. As far as I casn see, this would make the popular indignation against the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney partnership look nugatory.

Beyond that, advocates of such reparations are beginning to advocate "down payments" on such reparations even before ultimate means of financing them are determined. As a practical matter, this can be about the only serious way such a proposal could be implemented, since any concrete reparations proposal detailing the actual cost and tax impact would be impossible to sell, much less get through the courts. It would either drive a mass migration of population and businesses out of California, or it would cause a near-immediate upending of the current political arrangements in the state.

But so far, nobody seems to be paying much attention.