What To Do When You Run Out of Money? Reparations

Minnesota is now facing a $6 billion budget deficit for the upcoming biennium, and this year’s legislative session is dominated by the debate over what to do about it. But some Democratic Senators’ attention is elsewhere: they have introduced a bill to appropriate $100 million for slavery reparations.

The bill begins with the usual recitations with which we have all become familiar. In essence, it says that United States history consists of nothing but slavery–including the history of Minnesota, where slavery was never legal. And, of course, all ills now faced by black Americans have nothing to do with family structure, criminal behavior, drug use or bad choices generally. They all stem directly from an institution that was abolished 159 years ago. And, of course, there is no acknowledgement that most Africans who have emigrated to the U.S. have done so legally, as immigrants, rather than being brought to predecessor colonies as slaves.

John Phelan comments, with links in original:

Despite this dire fiscal outlook, there are still policymakers in St. Paul dreaming up madcap schemes to spend yet more taxpayer money. A striking example is SF 2368.

This bill, authored by Sens. Pappas (DFL), Maye Quade (DFL), Pha (DFL), Boldon (DFL), and Fateh (DFL) is:

Erin Maye Quaid is my senator.

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Aside from its fiscal lunacy, this is an odd bill to bring in a state like Minnesota. As I wrote in our magazine, Thinking Minnesota in a Summer 2020 article titled “Abolitionism in Minnesota,” our state was a strong supporter of efforts to end the evil of slavery: in the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln won Minnesota with 63% of the vote, his second largest share of the popular vote after Vermont. In the ensuing Civil War, Minnesotan soldiers fought and died on battlefields such as First Bull Run, Mill Springs, Antietam, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Missionary Ridge, and Nashville. Indeed, records show that 21,982 Minnesotans enlisted in the United States armed forces between 1861 and 1865 of whom 635 died in combat and 1,936 as a result of disease or accident. This is equal, proportionately, to 86,000 dead from today’s population. Minnesota paid a high price in blood to save the Union and end the evil of slavery.

This bill is both fiscally irresponsible and historically illiterate. We hope it is rejected.

Reparations are a kind of tic that many Democrats can’t suppress, even though such proposals make no sense.