You may recall that there was a reparations proposal made in San Francisco which suggested every black resident who met certain criteria should get $5 million. The people who came up with that proposal later admitted that no math was involved.

But this isn’t a story about the San Francisco proposal. This is a story about the California Reparations Task Force which was set up by Gov. Newsom in 2020. An early peek at the task force’s work last December suggested they were looking at a total payment in the realm of $223,000 per eligible recipient. But that was not a final proposal.

This week we got something closer to final numbers. While they vary depending on how long someone has lived in the state, the maximum would be around $1.2 million.

Economists advising California’s task force on reparations have, at long last, released an estimate of the damage caused by the state’s history of slavery and its many vestiges of white supremacy: up to $1.2 million per Black resident over a lifetime.

The payment estimates are described as a rough, partial estimate of what it would cost the state to compensate Black people for that legacy of harm, according to a draft of the task force’s final report. But the report states that those calculations are not a final recommendation on the total amount of reparations needed.

“Rather, it is an economically conservative initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, the State of California caused or could have prevented, but did not,” the report states. “(T)he Legislature would then have to decide how to translate loss-estimates into proposed reparations amounts.”…

An economist for the reparations panel has said the plan could cost California more than $800 billion; the state has a roughly $297 billion annual budget.

I’ll say this for the proposal. It makes California’s high speed rail plan look cheap by comparison. That project is up to a mere $113 billion. We could build at least seven bullet train systems for the cost of reparations.

The next big step for this plan will happen Saturday. That’s when the task force will decide to approve the final report. From there it goes into the hands of California’s state legislature.

The task force has until July 1 to deliver a final report, and a recommendation on cash payments, to legislators. From there, it’s up to Democratic leaders in the Legislature to determine how quickly to move.

There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that this will come to a vote at some point. Maybe then Democrats will explain to the rest of us where they plan to come up with 2 1/2 times the state’s annual budget?

There’s a whole chapter in the proposed report about how to educate the public about the need for these payments. Naturally it involves a new curriculum for California schools.

The Task Force recommends that the Legislature adopt the concepts discussed herein, which the Task Force developed with the support of these experts, as a standard curriculum. The Task
Force further recommends that the Legislature fund the implementation of age-appropriate curricula across all grade levels, as well as the delivery of these curricula in schools across
California. The Legislature should also create a public education fund, specifically dedicated to educating the public about African American history, and support the initial and ongoing
education about the Task Force’s findings…

The Task Force recommends that grade-level appropriate curricula be developed across every grade level, and the initial curriculum should be designed for high school students and young adults, followed by a curriculum for younger children, and one specifically for young adults in carceral settings. These curricula could also be adapted for use by adult residents for community popular
education aimed at increasing civic engagement. Finally, a curriculum should be developed for advanced learning and to further the academic study of these issues at the college and university
level. The proposed curriculum should be cross-disciplinary and seek to connect history, literature, math, and science, as the final report details the breadth of the harms that need to be understood by the public. The curriculum should include lessons on reparations that can be embedded in existing required high school coursework.

The report also has a Q & A section on frequent objections to the plan.

Enacting reparations in California could potentially cost California residents a lot of money. But neither I nor my family ever enslaved anyone. So why should we have to take responsibility for reparations for Black people?

As Americans and Californians, we have routinely taken collective responsibility or paid for a debt that we personally may not have caused. This is part of living within an organized society.
Even though individuals today may not be directly responsible, it is important to recognize that the profits and benefit to the country that came out of the enslavement system have been shared
by far more Americans and Californians than just those who enslaved people. As detailed in this report, the institution of slavery, the trade patterns in which it factored, and the industries which it supported substantially fueled the economic development of our entire country, enabling the United States to gain independence and establishing a foundation that allowed it to develop into the global leader it is today. The triangle trade, for example, paid for America’s best universities, which went on to educate generations of American lawmakers, inventors, and business people. They in turn went on to strengthen and expand the wealth of the country we live in today. Enslaved people built some of the most important edifices in our country, including some of the very symbols of our nation. Enslavement is woven into the very fabric of American history and society. There is no America today without the institution of enslavement. Every American today, including every Californian, has benefited from our country’s “original sin.” We thus need not assign fault or blame to today’s citizenry to understand that there is a debt owed by our nation and our state as a whole.

Functionally, as a society that has a history of actions in the interest of the greater good, we all own America’s debt. The public holds over $30 trillion of the national debt. Foreign governments hold a large portion of our public debt, while the rest is owned by banks and investors, the Federal Reserve, state and local governments, mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and holders of savings bonds. So how much does each citizen pay towards the $28.43 trillion of federal debt? If you take the national population estimate in 2021 of 332.8 million people,54 $28.43 trillion would be equivalent to more than $86,000 for every individual in the U.S.55 It is more common than not for the government to run an annual deficit,56 regardless of which political party is in charge. In fact, the federal government has run a deficit for 77 of the past 90 years and first carried debt after the Revolutionary War in 1790. The most significant increase to the national debt was the cost of World War II, which added roughly $186 billion to the national debt between 1942 and 1945. Congress added $236 billion to the national debt during FDR’s terms, representing an increase of 1,048%. More recently, during both the economic crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government took on not billions, but trillions of dollars of additional debt in order to ensure the collective good. Some people benefitted from these funds more directly than others, but the burden was shouldered collectively and the impacts accrued to the collective good. So it should be with reparations for African Americans.

So there you have it. Two paragraph to justify an $800 billion transfer of funds.