Paying cash to descendants of enslaved people is just the beginning of the California Reparations Task Force’s ambitious progressive vision.
Embedded in the panel’s 1,100-page report is a veritable leftist to-do list that includes: universal health insurance for Black residents, a guaranteed basic income, free college tuition, “forgivable” interest-free loans to small businesses and erasing interest debt on unpaid child support.
That’s not all. The report now before the state Legislature also recommends ending policing of nuisance violations such as public urination, allowing Black LGBTQ youth to receive confidential “mental health care” without parental permission, and adopting “rent caps” in historically red-lined areas.
Los Angeles radio host Larry Elder, a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, blasted the reparations concept as “nonsense” and criticized the task force’s hard-left tilt.
“There’s not a single conservative on this panel. You look at the bios of all the people there, it’s one left-wing person after another — nobody from the center, nobody from the right, no conservatives,” Mr. Elder said Monday on the Fox News Channel.
“The whole panel was basically designed to extract money from other people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”
The task force sent the report to the General Assembly at its final meeting June 29, but there may be no concrete activity until next year. Any legislative action would need to take the form of a bill, and the 2023 deadline for introducing new legislation passed in February.
That would give Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-controlled Legislature at least six months to consider the report and its recommendations, which have been hailed on the left as a blueprint for other states and even the nation.
Commanding the lion’s share of attention are the proposed compensation tables for past discrimination in health care, housing, unjust property takings, and mass incarceration and “over-policing” during the War on Drugs.
The task force did not recommend a total cost in its final report, but an eligible 71-year-old lifetime resident of California could receive as much as $1.2 million under the report’s financial models.
The cost of the reparations package has been estimated at $500 billion to $800 billion, well above the state’s annual $300 billion budget, but the task force said that its lengthy detailing of the harms of slavery and racial discrimination is not exhaustive.
“Since this list of harms and atrocities is not exhaustive, the total of the estimated losses to African Americans is not a final estimate of all losses,” the report said. “Rather, it is a very cautious initial assessment for what cost, at a minimum, the state of California is responsible. Further data collection and research would be required to augment these initial estimates.”
Reparations are the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners, to be given to people who were never slaves.@willcain pic.twitter.com/ftg98MI9vE
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) July 10, 2023
The task force voted to limit eligibility for cash reparations to descendants of an enslaved person or a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century,” but many of the report’s recommendations would include vast swaths of Black Californians.
They include the proposal on “closing the health coverage gaps” by adopting a “comprehensive universal single-payer health care coverage and health care cost control system for the benefit of all African Americans in California.”
Descendants of enslaved people would receive “special consideration.” The report also recommends increasing Medi-Cal reimbursement rates “to achieve parity with the reimbursement rates of private insurance.” Medi-Cal is the state’s Medicaid program.
The report proposes that only descendants would benefit from free college tuition at public universities and guaranteed basic income, but it also calls for funding education training in medicine, tech and other fields, as well as tuition-free law school.
A good slice of the report is devoted to LGBTQ-related recommendations, such as requiring that schools create and fund Gay Straight Alliance clubs when one student requests it and provide Black LGBTQ youth with behind-the-scenes counseling.
“A significant number of African American LGBTQ+ youth who want to access confidential mental health care without a parent’s permission are unable to do so,” the report said. “Therefore, the Task Force recommends that the Legislature enact legislation that will allow mental health providers to treat African American LGBTQ+ youth who are under age 18 and may otherwise not receive care because parental permission is required.”
Many proposals are similar to those pushed by Black Lives Matter, such as eliminating cash bail, expanding anti-racist training, removing officers from schools, ending qualified immunity for law enforcement, and blocking police enforcement of certain low-level offenses.
Those include “illegal camping, public intoxication, disorderly conduct, minor trespass and public urination.”
“Instead, a public health and safety institution, without criminal arrest or prosecution powers, would enforce prohibitions such as sleeping on the sidewalk, fare evasion, and similar transit-related or other public disorder violations that criminalize poverty,” the report said.
The report recommends eliminating the 10% interest on unpaid child support, saying that Black residents carry 18% of child-support debt despite comprising just 7% of the state’s population.
Other proposals echo the progressive boilerplate, including raising the minimum wage abolishing the death penalty, ending standardized-testing requirements for college, and urging Congress to eliminate the filibuster.
The legislature was also encouraged to repeal Proposition 36, the 2012 measure amending the state’s “three strikes” sentencing law to require that life sentences be imposed for serious or violent crimes, and Proposition 209, the 1996 affirmative-action ban.
The task force recommended creating and funding the California American Freedman Affairs Agency charged with helping residents trace their genealogy and implementing any policies approved by the state Legislature. The state was also urged to issue a public apology for its past wrongs.
Polls show California residents have mixed views on reparations, but the task force is prepared to sell its agenda. In fact, one of the report’s recommendations is to add the report’s content on slavery and discrimination to the standard school curriculum.
Kamilah Moore, who chaired the task force, has made the media rounds since the report’s release to promote its findings and proposals.
“We know that reparations particularly for descendants of slaves has always been a politically charged idea,” she said Sunday on MSNBC. “We actually created a public-education committee that is working to educate California’s public on our findings, as the intro to this segment noted, to change the hearts and minds of all Californians to support this idea. We know there’s a state battle ahead, but we’re prepared for the fight.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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