Political Irony

Want to save money — lots of money — on homeless people? Give them free housing!

The United Way of Los Angeles studied four people who had been living on the streets, then they put them into free apartments and got them access to free support services. Interestingly, it cost the government less money than it did when they were homeless. How could that be?

Living on the street can be rough. If you get sick, you go to the emergency room. During the time they were on the streets, the four people together used the emergency room 19 times. There were also the costs of shelters, which require people to run them. In addition, homeless people tend to get arrested, and the cost for police and jails is substantial.

In total, when the four were living on the streets, it cost the government $187,288. Afterwards, the same four people, including their free housing costs and all the free services, cost the government $107,032. The biggest savings was in medical costs, which went from $26,060 to $830, and in criminal justice costs, which went from $23,361 to zero.

That’s a savings of over $20,000 per person! Los Angeles is estimated to have 100,000 homeless people, so that could mean a savings of $2 billion in just one city.

Of course, our government is cutting services for the poor, and the mortage crisis is increasing the number of homeless people. We’re spending increasing amounts on medical costs and jails. No wonder our governments (especially state governments) are going broke. And the Republicans are calling for even more cuts to services for the poor, which will likely make the situation even worse.

Unintended consequences can be a bitch.

© Jim Morin
The Republicans say that raising taxes is not allowed. Nancy Pelosi has declared that Democrats will not support cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. So who is going to blink first?

Warren Buffett has one solution: “I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.”

I’ve often thought that our elected representatives are disconnected from reality, but I didn’t know it was this bad.

Last October, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) was piloting his Cessna to Cameron County Airport in South Texas, when he decided to land on a closed runway. The closure was reported in NOTAM (Notices to Airmen) but Inhofe didn’t bother to check that. The runway was also marked with a big X across it, which Inhofe saw but decided to ignore, even though there were construction workers and vehicles on the runway. According to one worker Inhofe’s plane touched down and then “sky hopped” over six vehicles and personnel working on the runway. One vehicle driver reportedly “wet his britches”. The airport manager, who has been a pilot for 50 years and did three tours of Vietnam, said he had “never seen such a reckless disregard for human life”.

Of course, Inhofe managed to wiggle out of any legal action against him, and amazingly still has his pilots license. But then he took it one step beyond. He introduced a bill to go after the FAA for “agency overreach”. Inhofe still claims he is innocent, complaining “I did nothing wrong, but at any time I could have suffered the revocation of a license.”

As Washington Monthly put it “Inhofe is probably about as good a pilot as he is a senator. That’s not a compliment.”

[Reprinted from The Serum Magazine.]

They also did a similar rundown at the end of March, and everything has changed since then. As everyone knows, even 24 hours is a very long time in politics, let alone a few months. So don’t take what any pundit says about who is going to win the Republican nomination very seriously.