(RightWing.org) – If you believe racism is everywhere, it’s no surprise when you find it everywhere you look. California’s Reparations Task Force (CRTF) has just given another great example of that. In its final report, the controversial team announced that charging interest on unpaid child support is racist — even though it applies to deadbeat dads of all races.
In 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) set up the CRTF to look at ways to pay “reparations” to Black residents as compensation for the historic injustices of slavery (which no living Californian was responsible for or harmed by). On May 6, it publicly announced a massive package of proposed payments that could hand up to $1.2 million to all qualifying residents and cost the state’s taxpayers $800 billion.
Many of these proposals make even less sense than the basic principle of people who never owned slaves making payments to people who never were slaves; for example, one of them would give residents $3,366 for every year they lived in California between the 1930s — 70 years after slavery was abolished throughout the US — and the 1970s. One of the strangest, though, is the CRTF’s claim that charging interest on unpaid child support is racist.
In California, unpaid child support attracts 10% interest. The reason behind this is simple — to encourage absent parents to make payments on time because the longer they leave it, the more it’s going to cost them. However, the CRTF has decided it’s actually “discriminatory” and means “a disproportionate number of African American parents are saddled with crushing debt.” Their reasoning is that black Californians make up under 7% of the state’s population but 18% of the parents with child support debt. They’re now demanding that the California Legislature passes a law that terminates all interest on child support payments.
The problem with this “logic” is that the law isn’t discriminatory at all; it applies equally to all races. If black Californians make up a disproportionate share of parents with child support debt, that’s because either they aren’t paying the child support they’re supposed to pay or they’re more likely to experience family breakdown — a reality that’s been blamed for damaging black Americans’ chances of success and prosperity since the 1965 Moynihan Report. Either way, making it easier for people to get out of paying child support is going to make things worse for black Californians, not better.
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