Blame Gov. Newsom for reparations plan's blowback

Gavin Newsom has actually found himself in an uncomfortable spot this previous week, as report recommend he is reducing expectations about supplying reparations payments to the state's African American population. The news media played up the key line in his statement after the task force released its report: "Dealing with that legacy has to do with far more than cash payments."

Distressed at the protection, Newsom's spokesperson posted a clarifying tweet, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported: "Gov. Newsom is * not * backing away from money payments, however wants to wait for the report in its totality to get here on his desk before he makes any choice."

Newsom clearly is attempting to soothe progressive activists who are promoting a broad and ideologically charged reparations program and citizens, who are highly opposed to reparations. Newsom signed into law the procedure that created this task force. His political predicament is of his own making.

Beyond short-term politics, the California Reparations Task Force report offers a blueprint for tearing apart the state's social material, obliterating its budget plan and setting California on a course of endless debates about historic oppressions. The report confesses that its propositions just are a "deposit" toward correcting policies that date back to 1850.

This technique results in myriad useful issues, too. These consist of determining a person's race, figuring out residency requirements and examining specific damages from difficult-to-assess requirements involving real estate discrimination, mass incarceration, health care inequities and the "devaluation" of African American businesses.

The state passed inequitable laws aimed at its Mexican population as well as a notorious anti-Okie law during the Dust Bowl migration. California wasn't a servant state, although Congress granted concessions to slave-holding Southerners as part of that statehood compromise.

The job force's calculations make one's head spin. Here's how it would figure out payments based on healthcare injustices: "Take an individual's worth of analytical life (roughly $10,000,000) and divide it by the white non-Hispanic life span in California (78.6 years in 2021) to obtain the worth for each year of life missing racial discrimination ($ 127,226).".

That's just one formula in a payment strategy that tries to remedy numerous billions of dollars in damages and could supposedly pay African American homeowners as much as $1.2 million. The nation's history is filled with racial and ethnic conflict, but trying to determine damages to existing groups based upon history is not the method to achieve equality.

The report likewise information a collection of wrongheaded policy ideas beyond monetary payments. The majority of those have absolutely nothing to do with previous injustices and everything to do with modern progressive political ideas. The job force calls for California to modify or rescind Proposition 209, the 1996 effort that forbids ethnic and racial predisposition in public accommodations. Moreover, the job force calls for making Election Day a paid state vacation, restoring voting rights to jail inmates, ending cash bail, increasing Medi-Cal repayment rates, repealing the state's three-strikes law and further raising the state's minimum wage.

The Legislature and the governor will have the last word on the recommendations, however such politically charged and dissentious rubbish should never have gotten this far. For that, we blame the guv.