San Francisco advances its reparations plan, has no idea how to pay for it
Zachary Faria
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San Francisco’s plan to give $5 million in reparations to each qualifying black resident in the city continues to move forward. One minor detail that no one has worked out yet is where that money is going to come from.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the draft plan, setting up another meeting on it for September. The committee behind the plan has admitted that there were no calculations made to arrive at that $5 million per person number. It was all based on a feeling about what seemed like enough.
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Neither the committee nor the Board of Supervisors, which you would think takes itself rather seriously, have determined where all this money would come from. Last year, the budget that the board approved for the city was $14 billion. If you stopped funding everything in San Francisco for an entire year and put that money toward the reparations plan, at $5 million per person, you could pay out reparations to 2,800 qualifying black people. San Francisco’s black population is roughly 40,000.
So even if the city had $14 billion to spend every year (which it may not, given its growing budget deficit), it would take over 14 years to pay out that kind of money to every black resident. Again, that is with the city spending nothing on any other city functions or programs. For 14 years, the city of San Francisco would have to stop running entirely in order to pay those reparations.
The city could (and would) weed out which recipients would be eligible for this, telling some of its black residents that their ancestors weren’t oppressed enough to get paid. The more black residents the city cuts out of the plan, the more it undermines its own logic for reparations.
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I guess it makes about as much sense as forcing people over 150 years removed from slavery to pay money to people 150 years removed from slavery in a city in California, which was never a slave state.
At some point, San Francisco will have to determine where all the money for its plan will come from and to whom it will be given. The result will either make a mockery of the original reparations plan, or it will bankrupt a city that is already bleeding tax revenue due to an exodus of residents. Then maybe San Francisco can start addressing its lower-priority issues, including rampant homelessness and drug addiction, and a rising cost of living that is driving the middle class out of the city.