News/Commentary

Calif reparations panel shrugs off staggering cost of proposed payout: Price tag is ‘least important piece of this’

April 14, 2023 | | Print Article

As California residents struggle under the weight of soaring inflation and the state’s notoriously high taxes and regulations, one member of the reparations task force is shrugging off the potential $800 billion cost of the racist proposal, claiming the cost is “the least important part of this.”

This, if the committee gets its way, would involve giving nearly three times California’s existing budget to roughly 1.8 million black residents, providing they can prove they had a relative who was once a slave. Each black descendent of a slave would receive just under $360,000, according to Fox News Digital.

That dollar amount could change. CalMatters reports that the task force has yet to come to a definitive dollar amount.

But money, task force member and clinical psychologist Cheryl Grills says, should not be the focus.

“We did not, at this last hearing, arrive at a single dollar figure,” Grills told CalMatters. “We’re not there yet.”

In an effort to distract from the mountains of money implementing the proposed reparations program, the task force has offered up thousands of pages of documents, data, and research to prove blacks living in a state that never allowed slavery are the victims of centuries of injustice and discrimination, making it difficult for them to own homes or survive the clearly biased criminal justice system.

“We want to make sure that this is presented out in a way that does not reinforce the preoccupation with a dollar figure, which is the least important piece of this,” Grills explained. “It’s important, but it’s the least important in terms of being able to get to a point in our country’s history and in California’s history where we recognize that the harm cuts across multiple areas and domains and that the repair needs to align with that.”

How the rest of California’s non-black residents — who, it may surprise Grills to learn, aren’t all Hollywood moguls and Big Tech billionaires — are going to foot the bill is of no concern to Cheryl Grills.

If you even ask the question, you are, in her opinion, “sensationalizing” the issue, rather than focusing on what is “important.”

And that, Grills said, makes her sad.

“It’s really unfortunate,” she said. “I’m actually sad to see that our news media is not able to nuance better. It’s almost like, ‘What’s going to be sensational’ as opposed to what’s important.”

Meanwhile, California is facing a multi-billion-dollar budget deficit, leaving reality-grounded taxpayers to wonder what woke wand wave will produce the extra dough needed to fund the reparations proposal.

Reports Fox News Digital:

It’s unclear how California would pay for large-scale reparations. Newsom announced in January that the state faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year. Then weeks later, the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, a government agency that analyzes the budget for the state legislature, estimated in a subsequent report that Newsom’s forecast undershot the mark by about $7 billion.

 

Pshaw!

According to Lisa Holder, another task force member and the president of the radically-left Equal Justice Society, the committee’s “recommendations will be breathtaking.”

“Reparations is a paradigm for understanding harm and repair as it relates to people who suffered a human rights injustice because of government action,” she wrote in an op-ed piece for CalMatters. “Harm and repair are the two sides of the spectrum. Consistent with this paradigm, the task force is evaluating the severity and articulating the scope of the harm to Black people, including all of the atrocities the government committed against Black people in California.”

“Monetary compensation is a critical component of reparations under international standards and within the American legal system,” she noted.

“With specific and tangible reparations initiatives, California is on the brink of a historic and seismic shift towards finally delivering justice for Black Americans,” Holder concluded. “The task force recommendations will be breathtaking. They must be nothing less.”

Melissa Fine
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