Kalifornia Krazy The Rush to Reparations-Blue State Madness
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/24/__trashed-3/
Maybe insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But insanity is also whatever the California Legislature is doing at any given time. The most recent example? A reparations bill that would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency has sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senate Bill 1403, one of at least 14 reparations bills introduced in the Legislature, cleared the committee by a 8-1 vote two weeks ago, confirming one more time that lawmakers have descended into madness. Unless they regain their wits, reparations will break the state.
But a return to reason is unlikely. Even though California was not a slave state, the Democratic side is all in. This was obvious in 2020 when they established a task force to study reparations.
“It appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance: Never create a commission to ‘study’ a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations,” University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot wrote Monday on Instapundit. Yet it was clear “from the start” that the task force “appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.”
There’s a lot of political mileage to be gained for lawmakers in blue states who glom onto progressive initiatives that make no sense to centrists and exasperate conservatives and libertarians. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where bad ideas are birthed and then surge across the country, infecting other Democratic citadels. In terms of rank, reparations might be the worst of them all.
Pacific Research Institute senior fellow Wayne Winegarden reckons that “a $2.8 trillion reparations bill” will bankrupt a state that is already flooded by red ink.
Now that astonishing figure is roughly 72% “of the state’s entire economy.” To fund such an expenditure would require “a more than 54% increase in their marginal state income rate and state sales tax burden.” If lawmakers take that route, they’ll wreck the state’s economy.
“Compared to California’s baseline growth, the economy in 2029 would be 11% smaller, the average family’s income will be 5.7% smaller, and there will be 4.9% fewer job opportunities,” says Winegarden. “The slower economy and higher tax burdens will also accelerate the current declines in the state population. By 2029, California would lose 1.8 million residents, including the huge increase in people seeking a better lifestyle in other states rather than California.”
But maybe the cost will be worth it. After all, we’ll finally have justice for past injustices, right?
Hardly. Anyone who believes reparations are the final step to healing and harmony is loco. Their legacy will be the intensifying of racial division, greater opportunities for graft, and a boost to race hustlers. People on both sides will feel that somehow they have been cheated. Many recipients will never feel whole because reparations will only whet appetites for further entitlement. Scores who are forced to pay for sins they didn’t commit will be understandably bitter.
There’s no crazy like California crazy. It’s a special kind of nuts, the sort that was once mostly confined to institutions that helped the disturbed deal with their troubles.
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