Governor Hochul recently signed a bill to create a New York State task force on reparations for African Americans.

This is the third such state reparations commission in the country, following California and Illinois — two bankrupt Democrat-run states that people are leaving en masse.

The reparations racket perfectly illustrates the American left’s desperate search for new goodies with which to bribe people into its cracking coalition.

The left cannot deliver public safety. It cannot deliver effective education. It cannot control the borders or immigration (two separate but related issues). It can’t stop the flood of fentanyl and the epidemic of drug overdose deaths. 

It can’t control inflation, bring down the price of gasoline, or keep food affordable. The left can’t run an effective bureaucracy or build public infrastructure on time and under budget. Basically, it can’t govern.

Given its dismal record of broken promises and performance failures, the left needs something new to promise its supporters so they won’t stay home in disillusion — or even worse, turn to Republicans in despair.

The most outlandish reparations scheme has come from the San Francisco Reparations Commission. It proposed $5 million payments, elimination of all personal debt and tax burdens, annual income of at least $97,000 for the next 250 years, and a house in the city for $1 per family.

The San Francisco plan is so extreme that pollster Scott Rasmussen reported 64 percent of people oppose the plan and only 27 percent support it. From a political standpoint, the key is that only 13 percent strongly favor the plan, while 54 percent strongly oppose. That is a 4:1 ratio strongly opposed.

You must wonder how anyone could support giving someone $5 million cash, eliminating his or her personal debt and taxes, and then giving them $97,000 a year for 250 years (presumably that would include their great-great grandchildren getting the money).

Of course, people aren’t asked how much they would be willing to pay to give other people reparations.

As an example of how rapidly the reparations racket can get out of hand, Professor William Darity of Duke University has proposed $12 trillion in reparations that would give every black household $800,000.

Note: The promise has moved from reparations for the descendants of slaves to simply being for all Black households. This is part of the left’s new racism which explains a large part of its declining appeal with Latino and Asian American voters, who would help pay for the new bribery and get no benefits.

There are two impossible barriers to the left’s new phony promise of money for its supporters.

First, New York simply does not have the money. Mrs. Hochul’s administration projects a $4.5 billion deficit this year — and even bigger deficits in the future. Reparations are an empty promise if there is no money.

Second, who gets money and who doesn’t under any reparations scheme? If the dividing line for money is race, does that mean New York’s millionaire black athletes will get government money? Does it mean that first-generation Nigerian entrepreneurs (who have one of the highest average incomes in America) will get government money? 

Do biracial people get half-payments? If President Obama were a New Yorker would he qualify? The bitterness, divisiveness, and opportunity for endless litigation make reparations one of the most destructive ideas in a remarkable range of damaging leftwing policies.

Of course, impracticality and impossibility never slow the left down. At the national level, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, has 135 Democratic co-sponsors.

Bribing voters is nothing new for the Democratic Party. In the great book, “Plunkett of Tammany Hall,” a former Democratic ward politician explained how giving people coal in the winter, a turkey at Thanksgiving, and other gifts held the Democratic machine of the 1870s together.

So, the bribes get votes — but they don’t improve peoples’ lives. As the New York Sun Editorial Board wrote on December 19, 2023: “The best way to defy the legacy of slavery and racism is to fix the state’s public education system, restore public safety, and strengthen free enterprise by cutting taxes and regulations.”

The Sun’s Editorial Board is exactly right. Reparations is just a new left-wing effort to bribe voters using the promise of money they won’t get — for a program that will never pass. It will not work.