I & I Editorial BoardMaybe insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But insanity is also whatever the California Legislature is doing at any given time. The most recent example? A reparations bill that would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency has sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senate Bill 1403, one of at least 14 reparations bills introduced in the Legislature, cleared the committee by a 8-1 vote two weeks ago, confirming one more time that lawmakers have descended into madness. Unless they regain their wits, reparations will break the state.
But a return to reason is unlikely. Even though California was not a slave state, the Democratic side is all in. This was obvious in 2020 when they established a task force to study reparations.
“It appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance: Never create a commission to ‘study’ a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations,” University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot wrote Monday on Instapundit. Yet it was clear “from the start” that the task force “appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.”
There’s a lot of political mileage to be gained for lawmakers in blue states who glom onto progressive initiatives that make no sense to centrists and exasperate conservatives and libertarians. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where bad ideas are birthed and then surge across the country, infecting other Democratic citadels. In terms of rank, reparations might be the worst of them all.
Pacific Research Institute senior fellow Wayne Winegarden reckons that “a $2.8 trillion reparations bill” will bankrupt a state that is already flooded by red ink.
Now that astonishing figure is roughly 72% “of the state’s entire economy.” To fund such an expenditure would require “a more than 54% increase in their marginal state income rate and state sales tax burden.” If lawmakers take that route, they’ll wreck the state’s economy.
“Compared to California’s baseline growth, the economy in 2029 would be 11% smaller, the average family’s income will be 5.7% smaller, and there will be 4.9% fewer job opportunities,” says Winegarden. “The slower economy and higher tax burdens will also accelerate the current declines in the state population. By 2029, California would lose 1.8 million residents, including the huge increase in people seeking a better lifestyle in other states rather than California.”
But maybe the cost will be worth it. After all, we’ll finally have justice for past injustices, right?
Hardly. Anyone who believes reparations are the final step to healing and harmony is loco. Their legacy will be the intensifying of racial division, greater opportunities for graft, and a boost to race hustlers. People on both sides will feel that somehow they have been cheated. Many recipients will never feel whole because reparations will only whet appetites for further entitlement. Scores who are forced to pay for sins they didn’t commit will be understandably bitter.
There’s no crazy like California crazy. It’s a special kind of nuts, the sort that was once mostly confined to institutions that helped the disturbed deal with their troubles.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Kerry Jackson
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
First, we want to ask about the educational level of these reparationist legislators on our West Coast, (are they educated at all; any history courses; does not seem they know much of anything useful), but with students at our most competitive universities showing us the severe limits of their own higher education, maybe being educated, intelligent or even wise are not needed when deciding about reparations?
Secondly, it is required viewing, absolutely required, for every legislator to watch the videos on this reparation subject by Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Victor Davis Hansen and Heather McDonald. They explain the issues in a historical context right up to the present that clearly debunks almost every stereotypical argument in the main stream on this subject.
Before thinking about reparations for another minute, please, legislators, all or you, view the videos by these four, before you impose colossal and very embarrassing mistakes on your own state.
I say double balls to this reparations nonsense.
Instead, I insist on being paid reparations for the sacrifice by my grandfather’s grandfather and all six of his brothers who served in blue during the unpleasantness of the 1860s in order to free the ancestors of all of these obnoxious people.
It’s time some segments of our population learned the value of gratitude or were shown the door to the land of their ancestors.
In lieu of a check directly to me, I’ll accept instead having my road paved properly and the freedom to drive at whatever speed I wish on the open highway regardless of posted limit. It’s the extent of the lawlessness I wish to claim, as opposed to what’s commonly seen in our cities of late.
There is an argument that the baseline for measuring reparations should be the net worth of those who remained in their native land. That is, you would compare the average net worth of African Americans to that of the citizens of any country in Africa from which most slaves originated.