We are constantly told that solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing poor and working class people in the U.S. do not exist. Meanwhile, billions taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the genocide of Palestinians.
That very money could have ended homelessness in the United States.
Money for our needs, not the U.S.-Israeli war machine!
We barely kept from defaulting on disability payments to our own veterans at the beginning of October. But we’ve got all the money in the world to create more suffering. Including putting our own troops in harm’s way.
FFS.
For those with a skeptical nature, I hunted down these numbers.
HUD does not provide numbers to “end homelessness”, they report on the state of homelessness including an estimated census of the homeless.
Some annalists have taken these numbers and multiplied them by the cost to imprison someone, or the average cost of American housing. These estimates come out to $11-30B.
So the numbers check out. The only fault I could find with this meme’s claims is that they are slightly misleading in suggesting $20B could “end homelessness” without the caveat that that’s only for one year.
20 billion could go a long way to curbing homelessness.
20 billion invested in high density, low rent housing units could make housing more accessible to millions of people, including the homeless.
Remember, not all homeless people are completely jobless. Many are couch surfing or sleeping in their cars, have stables jobs, and just can’t afford rent where their job is. An apartment they can afford could do a lot for these people.
You are correct. I like to focus instead on those lacking shelter who’ve been completely alienated from society and cannot be ‘re-rehabilitated’. These are the people who are erased when we speak about how lifestyle or work ethic “redeem” those in extreme poverty.
Of course the numbers are good.
My bullshit detector is going off for a different reason. This is an arbitrary short term vs long term comparison. The money that went to Israel wasn’t going to HUD either way. As someone correctly pointed out, $20B is a rounding error here.
Biden just wants to see more dead children
I don’t know about all that, but I do believe he has been captured by the MIC/Corporate influence and has no choice or control at all. But, I might just be naive in my thinking, lol.
Biden? No. Here’s him in 1982 wanting to kill women and children:
Begin said he was shocked at how passionately Biden supported Israel’s invasion when Biden “said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.”
https://theintercept.com/2021/04/27/biden-israeli-invasion-lebanon/
Yikes, thanks for sharing that. I’ve not seen anything like this. I have seen him say other pretty asinine things in his past, but nothing like this.
Unbelievable, but at the same time, being the USA the military hegemony it is, unsurprising too that these are words said by their leader.
American democracy in action.
Homelessness isn’t a bug in the system, its a feature. Employers need the threat of homelessness to push wages down and artificially inflate the labor supply. They need high rents to segregate portions of the community into “worthy” and “unworthy”. They need car-culture to keep people isolated from one another in between work and home. They need student debt to trap people into corporate jobs, rather than setting out on their own as entrepreneurs, co-operative partners, and social workers. They need mass media to keep people more afraid of “crime” and welcoming of the “police” than they are welcoming of neighbors-in-need and hostile to state surveillance and harassment of dissidents.
The $26.7B we’re sending to Israel is money towards an experiment in regional social controls and ethnic domination. If the Israelis can do it over there, the plutocrats back home can do it over here.
This implies that they care about the homeless issue. 23 billion is a rounding error in the budget. They just don’t want to fix it.
The site design could be better though. Human brains don’t understand how insanely large those numbers are without a visualization.
Secure connection failed. Lemmy hug of death?
Need poors so that the middle class can think they will become the billionaire class and continue to support their needs
Classes aren’t income divisions, but social relations to production. The US, since WWII, has always been thoroughly dominated by the Imperialist Bourgeoisie.
Imagine giving the DoD $800 billions in yearly budget while still has billions of surplus equipments.
If you’re in a poorly made boat that has a hole in it with two other people…
And you are all actively sinking in that faulty boat, about to die in the middle of the ocean…
And one of the people states they will make more holes so you all drown…
And the other wants to work to keep the boat floating enough to get to shore, but not to your ideal…
Who do you help in that moment, or do you fold your hands and sink on principle? And you understand that sinking is not a moral victory here, because you’ve effectively supported the person who wanted to make more holes and sink the boat.
If you don’t get to shore, you won’t live to attempt to sue that horrible boat company to hold them accountable and keep others from using their faulty boats. And if you don’t help the person bailing out water, the person making more holes will kill you all with less effort.
The “people” above are to represent general philosophies of the two “sides” in this discussion, not insightful candidates. There is no option to truly stay neutral here, direct action or willful inaction, both have impacts that you are responsible for.
What do you do?
