Posted on 12/05/2015 5:24:55 AM PST by Kaslin
When is the last time you heard Hillary Clinton talk about poverty? How about Barack Obama? Or Bernie Sanders?
Granted, they use the word "middle class" a lot. But when is the last time you heard them talk about what they want to do for the "poor"? I can't remember.
Take housing. On any given day about 565,000 people in the United States are homeless. That problem isn't going away any time soon. In fact, at the current rate of progress it will take 40 years before the homeless disappear from our shelters and streets. I don't recall any Democratic proposals to change that.
Ironically, the chronically homeless decreased more under President Bush (30%) than under President Obama (21%). Hillary Clinton actually charged a group of homeless veterans $500,000 to give a speech. (I have no idea where they got the money.)
When they talk about the problem at all, liberal Democrats invariably say we need to spend more money. But that's not the answer. Like the problems of education, transportation, medical care and lack of job opportunities, the housing problems of the poor are largely the creation of bad government policies. The cheapest, most efficient way to solve these problems is to change the bad polices.
In 1900, more than half the population was living in poverty, using today's definition. That was a time when there were huge influxes of people into the cities and urban areas. So where did all those people live? Were they all sleeping under bridges? Since we had a largely free market for housing, the private sector seemed to do quite well at meeting people's needs.
Not many of today's readers would want to live in the tenements that housed families 100 years ago. But at least they were housed. They weren't sleeping on the streets.
One way in which the private sector created housing space is with single room occupancy or single resident occupancy dwellings usually called SROs:
[These are] a form of housing in which one or two people are housed in individual rooms (sometimes two rooms, or two rooms with a bathroom or half bathroom) within a multiple-tenant building… SRO tenants typically share bathrooms and/or kitchens, while some SRO rooms may include kitchenettes, bathrooms, or half-baths… many are former hotels … primarily rented as a permanent residence.
These were born out of urban overcrowding, as cities scrambled to meet housing demands produced by industrialization and the urban population explosion of the early 20th century. But today, they are largely illegal. As Mariana lonova writes:
[T]he number of legal SROs in New York City has dwindled dramatically, with some 175,000 units disappearing between the 1950s and today. Single-room dwellings also fell out of favor in other urban centers across the country, which led in the loss of nearly 1 million SRO units nationwide. Between 1960 and 1980, Chicago lost 80 percent of its 38,845 SROs, while Seattle saw 15,000 units disappear. In San Francisco, more than 10,000 units were converted or demolished between 1960 and 2000….
Today, there are only 30,000 legal SROs in New York City, but there are an estimated three times that many illegal units meeting an ever increasing demand:
… poverty in New York has persisted and even worsened — today nearly a fifth of New Yorkers live in poverty, compared to less than a sixth in 1969. Meanwhile, changing gender and family norms have meant a massive increase in the number of single-person households in the city, which rose from 185,000 in 1960 to more than 700,000 in 1987 to an estimated 1.8 million today.
That city and state housing polices contribute to a housing shortage in places like New York and San Francisco and exacerbate the problem of homelessness is not even controversial. Here is a whole speech on the matter by Jason Furman, President Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. (HT: John Cochrane.) And here is an editorial on the issue by Paul Krugman.
Yet, neither Furman nor Krugman makes the point I made in "How Liberals Live." The worst housing shortages, the most homelessness and the worst inequality exist in the cities that are the most Democratic and the most liberal.
Liberals want to expand their voter base.
It’s why they never do anything that really helps the poor.
They are certain of the votes of the “gimmedat” poor. Its the votes of the middle class that they need to continue their march toward Marxism.
HUD hasnt fixed this in however long they have had to accomplish their mission?
When I think of poverty, I think of a person ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed...FDR's terms. Near destitution...really not knowing where tomorrow's meal is coming from. Are the "poverty-stricken" people we're talking about living like that? If not, then we have to redefine poverty.
Because poverty is not living a government-subsidized life with everything paid for and the recipient sitting on his or her hindquarters for 12 hours every day watching tv while gobbling cheese puffs. That's not poverty, that's parasitism.
Liberalism is beneficial only to those who who seek absolute power-it will destroy everything else.
They are not interested in helping the poor. If the poor would only wake up things would change.
It’s true for the blacks as well.
All the people who vote for the Democrats are fools. The Democrats say a lot of stuff but they never help anyone but themselves.
At some point, their voter base might catch on.
The link points to an article which is obviously satire.
Well, a government run by liberals isn’t exactly GOOD for poor people, and it hurts a few of them who might otherwise escape poverty, or, more exactly, escape the poisonous social environment created when lots of poor people live in the same place without their social betters.
But the “conservative” idea that, if you remove the liberals, Camden NJ, Baltimore and Detroit, Birmingham and Memphis, Rochester NY and Indianapolis will somehow pull out of their nosedive and begin to be safe and prosperous is stupid.
Yeah, I remember having read that it was satire.
HUD was designed to clear tenements and slum neighborhoods, and replace them with big public housing projects. It was fairly good at that task. The problem was, of course, that the cure was worse than the disease. HUD compounded our housing problems and probably set us back two generations in decently housing the poor. A classic fail.
No.
If you remove the libs the life in poverty would be much less appealing (and yes, people who breed children for freebies are voluntarily “poor” - often driving nicer cars than mine).
This morning I went shopping at our supermarket a bit later than usual; big mistake. The first-of-the-month welfarians were already clogging the aisles with their doubled-up carts (since neighboring Newark NJ is a food desert/welfare hive). One caravan looked like three generations shopping together with my money; the main sow in front filling the first cart, her teenager pushing that one and transferring items to the second cart to leave space for more, and granny/sow emeritus pushing the second cart.
I’ve spent three decades feeding their gluttony and sloth.
That's true, and I would favor removing them for that reason alone - paying women to have babies to be raised in a state of nature is immoral.
My point was, the Dennis Prager-Jack Kemp-Rand Paul types believe, or say they do, that the large, dysfunctional, and rapidly worsening "urban" culture is CAUSED by welfare, and the removing the CAUSE will make East St. Louis into Huxtable City. I don't believe that at all.
The poor are always with us. But it is also an immutable law that if something is subsidized, there will be more of it. Every city would have its bad streets and neighborhoods, but the poverty culture could never be so widespread without subsidy.
We’ve been at war with poverty since 1965, and there is no end in sight. It has become a quagmire and it is time to call it off.
That requires increasing the money supply, which increases aggregate demand, which increases prices, which hurts the poor, reduces the average real wage rate, and reduces the standard of living for the average worker, which is destructive to the middle class.
It also requires raising taxes or increasing government borrowing, which has a negative impact on aggregate saving, which reduces aggregate productive expenditure, which reduces aggregate production, which reduces aggregate supply, which also increases prices which hurts the poor, reduces the average real wage rate, and reduces the standard of living for the average worker, which is destructive to the middle class.
They claim to be for the "poor" but that ends up being tossing them just enough to keep them voting for them.
And this largess is only for non-workers. The working poor is completely cut out. And the government interference in the market just means that their housing, food and heating cost go up.
I see. Welfare certainly brought very destructive forces into cities, and the ghetto birthrates certainly fell after the Welfare Reform of 1996. While most cities have fallen even further, it has been possible to reclaim/gentrify some due to the lower birthrate. While Jersey City is not someplace I’d want to live, the difference between that and neighboring Newark NJ is stark.
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