Every month we devote posts to just general political class insanity that is running rampant through the country. The members of the American political class continue to show that they are incapable of efficiently operating any level of government in this country.
Even their best efforts are almost always ineffective at resolving any problem facing Americans. They spend a great amount of time not trying to improve the lives of their citizens but continually ensuring their reelection and enriching themselves, their families, and their friends in the process, all at taxpayer expense.
1)American politicians do very few things well, as witnessed by their inability to resolve any of the problems facing Americans today. However, they do one thing very well and that is spending a lot of money and getting very little positive results for their citizens. Consider just another example of this that happened in San Francisco:
San Francisco, like a lot of the state of California, has a very bad homeless population problem.
An organization known as HomeRise is a company that has contracted with the city to help find shelter for the thousands of homeless people living on the city streets.
However, a recent audit of the organization concluded that it actually spent about $240 million of taxpayer money, supposedly to get homeless people off of the streets, and managed to get very few, if any, homeless folks into shelters.
HomeRise operates 19 apartment complexes in the city which have 1,500 low income apartments.
The purpose of these apartments is to move homeless people into them so that they have shelter while they try to get their lives back together and become independent and able to shelter themselves.
However, the audit found unallowable, “imprudent, or questionable spending” when it uncovered the reality that HomeRise was using taxpayer dollars on fundraising events, paying lavish staff bonuses to its employees, and providing free lunches and gifts to employees.
118 credit cards had been issued to HomeRise staffers and many of these cards had been maxed out at their $10,000 credit limit because of questionable expenses.
The company had paid signing bonuses to some staff members even though those staff members had already been working for the company for years.
One staff member saw their salary go up $87,000 in a nine month timeframe.
In the meantime, many of its apartment buildings continued to see massive unused apartments despite the growing and large city homeless population, with the auditors concluding that these hundreds of empty apartments “represent missed opportunities to provide unhoused people with permanent, supportive housing.”
Adam Andrzejewski of OpenTheBooks chimed in: “It’s unclear exactly how much of the $240 million grants, loans, and subsidies was misused. But what is clear is that this company should never have been trusted with public funds.”
Meanwhile, while HomeRise was throwing fund raising events and parties, the city’s homeless situation got 6% larger in 2023.
Another day, another city, another political class which does not care that taxpayer wealth gets wasted everyday.
2)And while San Francisco has not been able to resolve it homeless problem, but not for lack of trying by spending and wasting a lot of taxpayer money, the city’s home state of California is not doing much better:
The state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, came into office about six years ago.
Since Newsom came into office, the state government and his administration have spent about $24 billion trying to fix the statewide homeless problem but homelessness has gone up by 13% since he took office.
There are about 182,000 homeless people in California today.
If we divide the $24 billion by the 182,000 homeless folks in the state, if that money could have magically been given directly to the 182,000, each homeless person in California would have gotten a check for about $130,000.
Seems like that would have been a much better solution than spending $24 billion and getting no discernible improvement in the homeless crisis.
Obviously, the math there is not realistic. But it does illustrate how inept or how corrupt today’s politicians are that in a single state they can spend $24 billion and get virtually no return on that investment.
3)Staying in California:
A recent video that was actually a tour of an area in Los Angeles has gotten a lot of attention, none of it positive.
The focal point of the video was a homeless encampment in downtown LA. which featured homeless folks wandering the streets, open fires on the streets, and trash everywhere.
Many of the social media comments stated that the city looked like it was in a third world country: “If you didn’t tell us this was LA, we would think this was a city in a third-world country!”
Elon Musk simply said “wow.”
The number of homeless folks just in the city of LA is estimated to be over 46,000, a 10% increase from the previous twelve months.
Longer term, the numbers are not any better with 10,000 more homeless today than in 2019 and 70% higher since 2015.
Female homelessness is up 55% in just three years with 90% of the homeless women interviewed saying that they had been victims of physical or sexual violence.
Los Angeles has embedded $609.7 million in its 2023-2024 fiscal budget to address the problem, up almost $62 million from the year before.
California politicians spend and spend when it comes to the homeless problem but never seem to find a solution that is wide reaching and permanent. The concept of just giving these folks checks for their survival rather than building huge government bureaucracies that get nothing done is seeming like a far better solution.
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If you agree that we need to deseat every member of Congress for their lack of success and accomplishment, then please consider going to the following petition link to help the cause:
https://www.change.org/p/deseat-congress-reset-freedom
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