The Racial Reckoning Is All About Greed, Isn't It?
03/30/2023
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From PBS:

Reparations could cost California more than $800 billion, econimists [sic] estimate

Mar 29, 2023 10:37 AM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate Black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.

OK, there are 2.5 million blacks currently in California, but those of post-1865 immigrant stock won’t qualify. Then, again, nobody seems clear on whether out-of-staters whose ancestors were oppressed by FDR’s redlining in California will qualify.

For sake of ease of calculation call it 2 million beneficiaries. That would be $400,000 each paid out.

The residents of California would need to pay and average of $20,000 each, or $80,000 per family of four.

The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older Black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span.

Do older blacks have shortened average life spans? Young blacks certainly do, in large part because they shoot each other so much, but do old blacks?

Nor does the figure count compensating people for property unjustly taken by the government or devaluing Black businesses, two other harms the task force says the state perpetuated.

After all, only blacks have complaints about eminent domain actions. Nobody else in American history figures that they deserved a bigger payout.

Black residents may not receive cash payments anytime soon, if ever, because the state may never adopt the economists’ calculations. …

Of course, to call BS, you’d have to be pretty RACIST, now wouldn’t you?

The statewide estimate includes $246 billion to compensate eligible Black Californians whose neighborhoods were subjected to aggressive policing and prosecution of Black people in the “war on drugs” from 1970 to 2020.

In contrast, the war on drugs has been called off since 2020 then and life has gotten so much better with nobody being murdered.

That would translate to nearly $125,000 for every person who qualifies.

The numbers are approximate, based on modeling and population estimates. The economists also included $569 billion to make up for the discriminatory practice of redlining in housing loans. Such compensation would amount to about $223,000 per eligible resident who lived in California from 1933 to 1977. The aggregate is considered a maximum and assumes all 2.5 million people who identify as Black in California would be eligible. …

Monetary redress will be available to people who meet residency and other requirements. They must also be descendants of enslaved and freed Black people in the U.S. as of the 19th century, which leaves out Black immigrants.

This could be what derails this, since immigrant blacks are more articulate than American blacks.

[Comment at Unz.com]

 

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