Perhaps unsurprisingly, the City Council seemed open to discussing the plan and the new additions to it that are currently being debated. Or at least they didn’t dismiss it out of hand. And that’s even more shocking when you consider what those “additions” would include. They wouldn’t be stopping at “just” five million dollars for everyone who qualifies as being Black under the proposal’s still-murky requirements. They would also receive:

• The elimination of all personal debt
• Freedom from paying taxes
• A guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for each person and their descendants for 250 years
• A new home in San Francisco for the price of one dollar

You can read an overview at the Associated Press and then we’ll get to the analysis and what the end game in this real-world scene from Idiocracy would probably look like.

Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

These are just some of the recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with a thorny question: What would it take to atone for the centuries of U.S. slavery and generations of systemic racism that continue to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity, and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations?

A first hearing before the city’s Board of Supervisors on Tuesday could offer a glimpse of the board’s appetite for advancing a reparations plan that would be unmatched nationwide in specificity and breadth.

Still unaddressed is the question of who would qualify as being “sufficiently Black” to hop on this gravy train. Would the children of biracial couples be allowed to enroll if they lived in “the Black community?” And who defines the Black community? Would DNA tests provide sufficient evidence to qualify? 23&Me assured me many years ago that I’m part “sub-Saharan African.”

Of course, I’ve never claimed African-American heritage or to be part of “the Black community.” I grew up in a rural white world. And I’d like to think that my values are strong enough to not pull this sort of scam, but I’ll confess that if I lived in San Francisco the temptation for that sort of payday would be palpable. But that’s the point. If it would even tempt me, how many more people in the city will try to scam the system?

But let’s skip past all of those pesky issues and imagine that this proposal will move forward, despite the fact that it would immediately bankrupt the city. Looking into our crystal ball, this could wind up turning into a very interesting social experiment. If they give out all of these riches to San Francisco’s Black community, what will the recipients be doing in five or ten years? Will they all be basking in the benefits of being in the top one percent of wealthy Americans? Or will the bottom fall out of their newfound wealth?

Sure, it would be easy to shout down my question and accuse me of racist inferences. That’s the default response for anyone who adheres to the concept of structural racism which underlies the entire reparations project. And to be clear, while America in the 21st century is not a “racist nation” as some insist and it’s light years ahead of where it was in my father’s day, the concept of structural racism has some merit. Black and Hispanic Americans do tend to be overrepresented in the lower average income brackets and part of the reason for that is that their families were born into that status in many cases.

But that’s not a phenomenon that is defined by race. There are more white people than Black people who are born poor and never magically rise to the ranks of the rich and famous solely because of their skin color. Just look at the people of East Palestine for examples. There are countless examples of low-income rural areas where white residents outnumber minorities by large margins. So structural racism isn’t the answer we’re seeking.

Consider again my question above regarding whether the recipients of all of this wealth would still be near the top of the food chain in ten years or whether they would manage to burn through or otherwise lose their wealth. That’s another easy question to frame as an example of me making racist assumptions. But that’s not the case. Rather than being an example of structural racism, what we’re really talking about here is the concept of structural wealth. Allow me to briefly explain what I mean.

I still recall an economist back in the 80s who proposed a thought experiment that I was unable to dredge up today. He posited a scenario where everyone in the United States from the richest to the poorest would have every last bit of their wealth vacuumed up by the government and divided into precisely equal shares and redistributed. Every person would have exactly the same amount of money, housing… everything. The author predicted that ten years later, with a few exceptions here and there, the people who had previously been on top of the economic ladder would be back there again or at least well on their way. And the people at the bottom of the social food chain would mostly be heading in that direction again.

And that’s not a proposition driven by racial factors, though some of that would no doubt show up because of the distribution factors I mentioned above. The reality is that some people simply won’t be able to handle and maintain wealth because they lack the experience and tendencies of those who came from a system of structural wealth. And again… that’s not restricted in any way by race.

Take the example of Jack Whittaker. He was a good ole’ West Virginia boy who was whiter than Wonder Bread when he won $314 million dollars in the lottery. In a shockingly short period of time, he had blown through all of it by showering money on strippers, gambling, partying, and falling for the schemes of con men. And how many famous athletes (including white players) have been given multimillion-dollar contracts for years only to plunge to the depths in their post-career lives? (See Barrett Robbins.) Don’t even get me started on poor Richard Hilton and how horrified he must have felt watching his daughter Paris after she went out into the world on her own. And then there was one young man who figured out a clever way to make millions of dollars off of his family name and still wound up snorting crack off of some prostitute’s backside in a broken-down brothel. (The name escapes me at the moment.)

The point is that some people simply can’t handle money and that is often because they didn’t come up via a background of structural wealth. Managing wealth isn’t easy and the temptations that come with excessive wealth are many. So as I said above, this reparations scheme in San Francisco could be an enlightening social experiment if it were to happen. But the results would likely not be as fabulous as most supporters seem to believe, or at least not for everyone.