San Francisco's Bizarre Reparations Bill

Rare image of Daniel Lurie 
actually looking to the right.

Curmie can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a few years ago a friend presented him with a check for $100 million with the warning that “it might be difficult to cash.”  That moment was called to mind recently when Curmie read about San Francisco mayor Danie Lurie’s signing a bill to create a reparations fund for black residents.

The headline on the Financial Express article, in particular, caught Curmie’s attention. “Over 4600 Californians likely to get $5M reparations under new law.”  “Likely”?  Seriously?  The first sentence of the piece by Aditi (whoever or whatever that may be) tells a more accurate tale: “San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has signed an ordinance creating a Reparations Fund that could one day offer up to $5 million to eligible Black residents, though no city money has been allocated yet.”  Seldom have more modifiers been crammed into a shorter space: “Could.”  “One day.”  “Up to.”  “Eligible.”  Not to mention that literally no money has actually been designated for the purpose. 

<Sigh.>

Let’s not completely leave aside the whole issue of whether reparations ought to exist at all, even in theory.  Curmie thinks not, but you’re free to disagree, Gentle Reader.  Certainly there has been historical prejudice against blacks, but the same could be said in varying degrees to people who are female, gay, or short, bald, or left-handed, for that matter.  There are about 11,000 people of Japanese descent living in San Francisco.  Some of them, no doubt, were interned during World War II for no crime other than where their ancestors were born.  A good many more are their direct descendants.  Yet there is no movement to offer reparations to those whose claims to have suffered directly are so readily, objectively, provable.  Go figure.

But even if you think reparations are appropriate, lump sum payments or $5 million seem a bit extreme.  And the logistics are daunting, to say the least.  Who is eligible?  How black is “black”?  Would bi-racial Barack Obama be eligible if he lived there?  Or does the fact that he doesn’t need the money disqualify him?  How long must a prospective recipient have lived in San Francisco to be eligible, or is the city going to pass out millions to every black person who moves into the city?  Are there any criteria other than race?  For example, must an applicant demonstrate specific harm?  And on and on…

Exactly where that 4600 recipients number noted in the headline above comes from is unclear, as it represents fewer than 10% of the black population of the city.  But even that number would mean a total outlay of $23 billion.  Expand that to the entire black population of the city and the cost balloons to about $275 billion, or the entire city budget for over 17 years.

There’s literally no way the San Francisco will ever come up with anything like the kind of money we’re talking about here, especially since the city is broke, running a $1,000,000,000 budget deficit.  So no money is being allocated for this agency.  That’s the good news.  Ah, but you see, that’s where the private donations come in.  Riiiiiight.  So we’re expecting billionaires (because that’s who it would take) to fund a program that helps only black people, and only those who live in San Francisco.  Curmie would suspect that anyone interested in the general cause of helping black people would rather donate to, say, the NAACP or the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.  Still, if people want to voluntarily fund this program, that is their prerogative.  Curmie thinks it’s silly, but so is buying a Trump Bible or investing your life savings in bitcoin.  Stupid is as stupid does. 

If the fund is going to rely on individual donations, as it must, then the logical solution is to turn the whole business over to a private foundation to administer.  That’s the real rub: by signing on to this idiotic bill, Lurie is indeed committing city funds to the program.  Merely establishing the agency means someone has to run it, even if there’s no money there to allocate.  And the logistics of trying to figure out the details would not only be time-consuming, but would almost certainly lead to litigation, costing the city even more money to support a program that is unwieldy, unethical, and legally problematic to say the least.  Curmie supposes that establishing the new agency is some form of perverse virtue signaling, but he confesses he doesn’t see the virtue involved.  When Curmie was a lad, San Francisco was pretty much synonymous with drug culture.  It would appear that the hallucinogens are still plentiful there.

We are left with two possibilities as to why Lurie signed this bill.  Perhaps he’s a brilliant strategist, willing to spend a tiny fraction of the city’s budget to get the proponents to shut up for a while.  Or stupidity and cowardice are in a death struggle to become his defining characteristic.  Curmie leans towards the latter explanation.