Reparations Again

Good morning! Today is Jan. 1, 2025. Sorry, 2026. (Ha! It's okay. Now that I've got that out of my system, I won't be wasting checks with the wrong year on them anymore.

I see you survived the party. Quite an accomplishment all by itself. On the other hand, given that we have survived 2025, maybe last night wasn’t that large a hurdle by comparison. Just think, only 11 months until Christmas.
 
Today in History: 

46 BC: The Julian calendar takes effect for the first time by edict of Roman dictator Julius Caesar. 

1583: First day of the Gregorian calendar in Holland and Flanders.

1700: Russia begins using the Anno Domini era and no longer uses the Anno Mundi era of the Byzantine Empire.

1724: Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit proposes a system for making thermometers, and the Fahrenheit temperature scale is born.

1863: Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.

1881: Dr. John Watson is first introduced to the character Sherlock Holmes in a story written by Arthur Conan Doyle.

1923: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics established.

1958: European Common Market established.

Birthdays today include: 2026, Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, J. Edgar Hoover, Barry Goldwater, and J. D. Salinger.

* * *

Michael Dorgan reported yesterday at Fox News:

The mayor of San Fransisco signed an ordinance that creates a "Reparations Fund" that could one day grant each of the city's eligible black residents up to $5 million in reparations for alleged historic discrimination and displacement.

The ordinance, which was passed by the Board of Supervisors earlier this month, was signed by Democrat Mayor Daniel Lurie two days before Christmas. It establishes the legal framework for the fund but does not allocate funds or guarantee payments. The fund can be financed with private donations, foundations and other non-city sources. 

Folks, every city in California is so broke that they can’t even pay attention. So what’s the deal here?

Any taxpayer-funded reparations payouts would require separate legislation, an identified funding source and mayoral approval. Lurie told Fox News Digital that no taxpayer money would be paid into the potential pot, given the city's $1 billion budget deficit.  

Aha. I see. (Cold stare).

So the whole thing is an exercise in leftist virtue signaling?
That figures. They’re looking for a way to appear like they’re doing something about a problem that was never theirs, without actually having to commit to money being passed out. How alarmingly typical.

The fact is that nobody alive today was ever a slave or even knew a slave. Nobody alive today was ever a slaveholder. In the simplest terms, “reparations” has always been little more than a money grab that will bleed our country dry. And even that assumes they actually have any money at all to place in the pot, as we know quite well, they don’t. They’re broker than Penn Central. They passed this thing, so as to buy votes, while not actually paying out any money in the hopes of burnishing their image, at little cost.

Oh, and how much money are we talking about?

The report, which is nonbinding, studied harms to black residents and proposed remedies, including a recommendation of a $5 million payment. Around 46,000 black residents live in San Francisco, according to U.S. Census data.

Yeah, well, about that; How many illegal aliens were listed in that census count?

I’ve discussed the census and its bearing on the question of illegal aliens here previously. The accuracy of that count is questionable, right at the outset. We don’t know, but I’ll bet under this plan, a lot of them will get that cash.

Now, let’s say by some strange twist of fate, they managed to fully fund this thing. Five million dollars multiplied by the 46,000 residents the census supposedly lists, and you have a subtotal of roughly $230 billion. Of course, there’s administering such a project, people they figure they needed to count, and however much falls off the top of the pile for political campaigns, (did anyone really think I was going to ignore the rather obvious graft going on in California?) and the cost of this, in my estimation is somewhere in the area $275 billion, and I probably low-balled that a bit.

"The City and County of San Francisco and its agencies should issue a formal apology for past harms and commit to making substantial ongoing, systemic and programmatic investments in black communities to address historical harms," the report states in its executive summary.

Well, forgive the observation, but we’ve been pouring money into black communities since the start of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society back in the ‘60s.

Stated simply, passing out taxpayers’ money doesn’t solve poverty, gang. Johnson’s Great Society proved that, if it proved nothing else. After trillions that Johnson and Nixon, after him, spent, the poverty rates went down by around 9% overall, depending on who is doing the study. The cost was far greater than the dollars involved directly. Those programs proved a detriment to the social norms and behaviors of the very people those programs were intended to help. That, in turn, turned a helping hand into a hammock, destroying the black family structure. Numbers, you say?

The rate of black children born to single mothers has been going nearly straight up, to the point now where these days over 50% of black Children are born to single mothers, and of those, around 50% are on some sort of government assistance to this day. That situation has become the cultural norm, which explains a good deal of the remaining poverty rates, generation after generation. So not only has our effort at what we can call "toxic empathy" made the situation worse, but it's been costing taxpayers billions. Gee, sounds like a good plan... let's do it again. [/sarc]

Defender Network, in addressing the total figure across all races, says:

The rate of single motherhood in the U.S. has significantly increased, with 23% of American children raised in single-parent households, the highest in the world, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. In 2019, nearly half of all babies were born to unmarried mothers, a significant increase from 1960.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education nails it down a bit tighter in an article from last year:

The United Census Bureau has released a new report on the demographic profile of households and living arrangements in the United States over the past 50 years.

The report found that the share of households made up of married-couple families has significantly dropped since the 1970s, particularly for non-White households. In 2022, only 27 percent of black households were married-couple families compared to roughly 50 percent of White households.

Black households were the most likely group to be a family households maintained by a women without a spouse, with about 25 percent of all black households falling into this category. black women were also found to be more likely than black men to be part of a non-family household. This is notable as the report found unmarried families are significantly economically disadvantaged compared to married couples, who experience higher levels of household income, home ownership, and health insurance coverage.

LBJ’s attempt at solving poverty, particularly in black households, was a complete disaster, both for black households and for the country as a whole, given the expense we’ve been exposed to in keeping the lie going all these years, and the social impact it had on the black community.

So we’re to believe that more government handouts, now supposedly in the form of reparations, are not going to do even more damage? (Shaking my head.) Say what you will about the people pushing this nonsense, but one thing you MUST say is they’re consistent.

Thought for the day: You very seldom need to change anything you got up at 3 a.m. to write.

I'll see you tomorrow.

Time's almost up to get 74% off PJ Media VIP with the code MERRY74 — and yes, that same code works if you want to give VIP as a gift to someone who appreciates the unique offerings here: honest reporting, straightforward commentary.