The Patriot Post® · The New San Francisco Gold Rush

It wasn’t long ago that the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee recommended — drum roll, please — reparations. And we’re not talking about the bailout of wealthy Big Tech and Big Climate leftists at Silicon Valley Bank.

Instead, the committee wants a lump-sum payment of $5 million for each of San Francisco’s qualifying black residents, at least $97,000 in guaranteed annual income for 250 years, and homes in the city made available to them for just $1 per family.

“There wasn’t a math formula,” admitted Eric McDonnell, the chairman of the committee. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth, and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

Asian-Americans in San Francisco were evidently not available for comment on this “journey.”

The idea of reparations is based on the lie that America itself was built with slave labor, and that “systemic racism” has been perpetrated by white Americans ever since. Clearly, slavery in America was racist and an awful institution, and for many reasons that had lasting consequences, including racist practices that inhibited blacks even in non-slave states like California.

Yet categorically confiscating money from today’s non-blacks to pay today’s blacks for the oppression of generations past won’t fix that. In fact, it’ll make things worse. To the tune of $600,000 per non-black family, according to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Hoover’s Lee Ohanian does the math formula the committee was all too happy to ignore: “Paying $5 million to 35,455 individuals totals about $175 billion. To put this in perspective, the city’s budget for the current fiscal year is $14 billion, while this proposed sum exceeds the current state budgets of all US states except for California, New York, and Texas.”

Maybe that’s why the committee resorted to veiled threats. “I don’t need to impress upon you the fact that we are setting a national precedent here in San Francisco,” said Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the committee. “What we are asking for and what we’re demanding for is a real commitment to what we need to move things forward.”

The all-Democrat San Francisco Board of Supervisors was thus receptive to the committee’s report earlier this week. Hillary Ronen, for one, said: “You have my 100% support and commitment to implementing, quite frankly, all 111 of these recommendations. They are all warranted.”

A final report is due in June, but then the issues will be many. The city now has fewer than 50,000 black residents, but which ones are eligible? Proposals include being age 18, “identifying” as black in public documents for at least a decade, living in the city for at least 13 years, and various other qualifiers.

To say there will be a rush for this gold is an understatement.

Obviously, the proposal was rejected by the few local Republicans anyone could find. It’s “completely unserious,” scoffed John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party. “It seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass.”

The proposal received some criticism from some surprising sources, however — the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP being one. Urging the board to reject the proposal, the NAACP instead says more investments and opportunities would present “the best path forward.” Xaviaer DuRousseau, a former Black Lives Matter activist who converted after “seeing the light,” denounced it as “unrealistic” and “disgusting” and designed “to indoctrinate people with victim mentality.”

He pointed where we would point — to the homeless, especially veterans, on the needle-ridden and feces-covered streets of San Francisco. Blacks now make up less than 6% of the city’s population but an estimated 38% of its homeless people. If the do-gooders running the city want to actually do good, they’d clean up the city, make it safe, and free its residents of the draconian one-party tyranny that has plagued it for so long.

On a final note, the city’s board of supervisors is also considering another idea — lifting the ban on city-funded travel to 30 states that don’t comport with leftist sensibilities on abortion and “transgender” rights. As The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman humorously put it, “The city is on the brink of ending its trade embargo against most of the United States.”

For several years now, San Francisco has only exported its residents. We’d say the pain is starting to open some minds except that enacting reparations will likely only accelerate that exodus.