FIRST ON FOX: Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds slammed the city of San Francisco’s new reparations proposal giving longtime Black residents $5 million and wiping away their debt as “patently unfair.”
Donalds blasted the new proposal brought up by the coastal California city’s committee on reparations that would give the beneficiary residents a seven-figure payday and total debt forgiveness due to the decades of “systematic repression” faced by the local Black community.
“San Francisco’s reparations proposal is patently unfair and nothing but a distraction to cover for the incompetence of local Democratic leadership,” Donalds told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
“Rather than focusing on lowering the cost of living, a historic homelessness crisis, the opioid epidemic, or even the record levels of crime plaguing their city, San Francisco’s Democratic city leadership would rather divide their constituents further under a pretense of racial equity,” Donalds continued.
Donalds’ comments come as San Francisco weighs the reparations committee’s hefty proposal.
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which advises the city on developing a plan for reparations for Black residents, released its draft report last month to address reparations – not for slavery, since California was not technically a slave state, but “to address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate Black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.”
“While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement,” the draft states.
The draft plan includes a long list of financial recommendations for Black San Francisco residents, including a one-time, lump sum payment of $5 million to each eligible individual.
“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy,” the draft states.
To be eligible for the program, the applicant must be 18 years old and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years. They must also prove at least two of eight additional criteria, choosing from a list that includes, “Born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and has proof of residency in San Francisco for at least 13 years,” and/or, “Personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs.”
The plan also calls on the city to supplement lower-income recipients’ income to reflect the Area Median Income (AMI), about $97,000, annually for at least 250 years.
Meanwhile, President Biden attacked Republicans on Monday as being “fiscally demented.”
Donalds fired back at Biden during a Monday spot on “Jesse Watters Primetime” where the Florida congressman and member of the House Financial Services Committee said the president “sounds utterly ridiculous.”
“Look, everybody knows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government spent more money than it ever had to try to keep our economy, and better yet, the lives of the American people, afloat,” Donalds said.
“Now that COVID is gone, we’re actually regressing in terms of spending. That’s a good thing,” the Florida congressman continued. “For him to take credit for it makes no sense at all, because he is the one who has plussed-up spending across the board and actually fights for returning to spending levels pre-COVID-19, which is, frankly, where we should be going.
“So for him to make a statement like that, is because what he wants to do is keep all of the items he has ratcheted up spending in, he wants to keep those in place,” he added. “As opposed to doing the smart thing, the responsible thing, the fiscally-sound thing, which is examining spending at the federal level so we can get our debt under control, our inflation under control — which he caused by the way — and let the American people thrive and prosper.”
Fox News Digital’s Jessica Chasmar contributed reporting.