California made news last week when Governor Gavin Newsom’s reparations committee called for giving descendants of slaves (meaning all black people in their view) $223,000 each due to “housing discrimination.” Now some Democrats in New York want to follow California’s example.
Supporters of reparations previously pushed failed legislation this year calling for a commission to provide billions in reparations for black people. In the wake of California’s actions, however, they will try again to bully the state legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul into approving a commission.
From The New York Post:
“We saw what happened in California. We want to pass a bill that starts a conversation about reparations,” said Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages (D-Nassau), chairwoman of the New York Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, to The Post.
Assemblywoman Taylor Darling (D-Nassau) said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature don’t green-light a reparations study commission.
Darling also scoffed that the $223,000 figure that California’s task force recommended for each black descendant there was too low.
“This country was built on the backs of enslaved people. It has impacted everything — housing, economic development, education,” she said.
The Gateway Pundit’s Cristina Laila pointed out in her article on California’s reparations committee that their proposal would cost the taxpayers an eyepopping $559 billion. The current California state budget is $308 billion.
The proposal envisioned by the New York assembly members would far exceed this. There are approximately 3.8 million blacks residing in the state. Should New York provide each black individual $300,000 in slave reparations, for example, the total cost for the taxpayers would be around $1.14 trillion. Does this sound feasible?
Reparations are not popular with the public to begin with. A poll released last year showed 62% of all Americans opposed paying reparations to the descendants of slaves. And who can blame them? Punishing today’s Americans for the sins of their ancestors is fundamentally immoral not to mention unconstitutional.
Another issue with reparations is not every person with black blood descended from slaves. Donald Harris, Kamala Harris’s father, says he is a descendant of a slave owner, not actually slaves. Yet Harris and her family would qualify for reparations under the proposals from California and New York.
The California and New York proposals also seem to indicate that all racial groups would subsidize black people rather than just whites. While punishing white people alone is fundamentally evil, penalizing Asians and Hispanics is even more absurd. At last check, these groups never owned slaves in America. Just another example of how poorly considered these ideas are and how supporters only see dollar signs.
Reparations serve as just another example how Democrats want to exploit racial divisions for political gain, no matter the cost. All of them should be voted out of office.