It’s no secret: Gavin Newsom wants to be president someday.

Nor is it a secret that the California governor will need at least 85% of the black vote if he’s to win the White House. Which is why he commissioned a task force earlier this year to study the issue of reparations and is now pushing a plan to pay as much as $223,000 per person to black Californians, whom he says “must be financially compensated for decades of discrimination.”

That hefty number “derives from the ‘housing wealth gap’ Black Californians have allegedly experienced as a result of discriminatory policies in place between 1933 and 1977,” reports National Review. “The task force estimated that the policies cost black residents $5,074 per year.”

The total cost of the payout? Approximately $569 billion statewide. Since when does California have that kind of money?

“Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a ‘free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century,’” reports The New York Times. “Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.”

Regardless of the ostensible manner of distribution, could there be a more shameless or cynical scheme than one that gets people’s hopes up for a massive payout when there’s no chance on earth that such a raced-based redistribution of income could ever come to fruition?

Put another way: Given that California is approximately 40% Hispanic, 37% white, and 15% Asian, what are the odds that this 92% of the state’s population is going to willingly cough up somewhere north of $200,000 per person to the 6% of the state’s population that is black?

Not. Gonna. Happen.

And it shouldn’t happen. In his 2002 book Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery, David Horowitz recounts an ad he produced that listed 10 reasons why reparations for slavery is not only a bad idea but a racist one, too. Twenty years later, his list holds up pretty well. Among its points:

• There’s no single group that was responsible for slavery.
  
• There’s no single group that benefited from it exclusively.
  
• Only a small minority of white Americans owned slaves, while hundreds of thousands of whites gave their lives to the cause of abolishing slavery.
  
• Most living Americans have no connection to slavery, direct or indirect.
  
• The reparations claim is based on race, not injury.
  
• The claim is one more attempt to divide the races and turn black into victims.
  
• Trillions in reparations have already been paid to blacks via “Great Society” giveaways and other social programs.

In 2002, Horowitz noted that 75% of Americans agreed that reparations were a bad idea. By 2020, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, that number had risen to 80%.

Other than the woeful lack of public support, the illegality of such a nakedly race-based giveaway is its greatest obstacle. “Giving people money based on their race generally violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause,” notes legal analyst Hans Bader, “even when the recipients are a minority group. Courts have struck down affirmative action programs that were designed to remedy discrimination that occurred over 20 years before the affirmative-action plan because that’s too long ago.”

The task force is expected to submit its final recommendations by June 2023. It’ll likely be a doozy. The group’s interim report weighs in at nearly 500 pages. Knock yourself out.

But here’s the important part: Any recommendations from the task force will have to be approved by the California state legislature before being enacted.

Between now and then, we suspect California state legislators will get an earful from their constituents. We suspect they’ll be loath to go along with this deeply divisive race-based giveaway.

But in the meantime, Gavin Newsom will have cynically succeeded in ingratiating himself to a vital Democrat constituency. Heck, his reparations gig is almost as ingenious as Joe Biden’s phony promise to do away with all that student loan debt.

As P.T. Barnum may or may not have said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”