Funding and Expanding Poverty

"Help the poor," has been Theftocrat boilerplate since Lyndon Johnson's creation of the Great Welfare Society.  Let us be clear.  What they mean by help is welfare.  Welfare is the collection of resources that agents of the state take from people who earned them in order to give them to people who have not.  Recipients are overwhelming providers.
 

Questions come to mind upon hearing this help-the-poor mantra.  Who will be providing the help?  What form will this help for the poor take?  What is this help expected to accomplish?
 

The answer to the first question is that it will come from private sector workers.  Not people in government service, they are paid from the earnings of those outside of government.  The people who earn money in legitimate private enterprise are the workers, from Wall Street executives to Wal-Mart greeters.  Yes, that is correct.  Poor working families are helping to shoulder the burden of non-working poor families.
 

Among the provided forms of assistance, housing might be the most significant because it provides a place to prepare food, sleep, collect mail, send children to school, and store essential belongings.  So why then is the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development doing such a poor job of providing housing to its clients?
 

The Washington Post reports in their article "A Trail of Stalled or Abandoned HUD Projects" that the federal government’s largest housing construction program for the poor has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them.
 

Nationwide, nearly 700 projects awarded $400 million have been idling for years, a Washington Post investigation found.  Some have languished for a decade or longer even as much of the country struggles with record-high foreclosures and a dramatic loss of affordable housing.
 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the nation’s housing fund, has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects.
 

The result is a trail of failed developments in every corner of the country.  Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected.  Houses that were supposed to be renovated are boarded up and crumbling, eyesores in decaying neighborhoods.
 

Two and one-half years in office is enough time to recognize the trends of this administration; we have inept and corrupt departments of Interior and State.  The president's foreign policy has been naive, gullible, and self-destructive for America.  Domestic policy has been the same failed Theftocrat experiment: it is the usual grand pontification, hand-over-fist grabbing of others' resources, and the same programs alleged to end poverty that actually perpetuate and increase it.
 

The Post's exposé reveals that HUD's housing for the poor program has been, largely, a boondoggle.
 

• Local housing agencies have doled out millions to troubled developers, including novice builders, fledgling nonprofits and groups accused of fraud or delivering shoddy work.
• Checks were cut even when projects were still on the drawing boards, without land, financing or permits to move forward. In at least 55 cases, developers drew HUD money but left behind only barren lots.
• Overall, nearly one in seven projects shows signs of significant delay.  Time and again, housing agencies failed to cancel bad deals or alert HUD when projects foundered.
• HUD has known about the problems for years but still imposes few requirements on local housing agencies and relies on a data system that makes it difficult to determine which developments are stalled.
• Even when HUD learns of a botched deal, federal law does not give the agency the authority to demand repayment. HUD can ask local authorities to voluntarily repay, but the agency was unable to say how much money has been returned.
 

The D.C. region has a particularly troubled track record.  In Prince George’s County, the nonprofit Kairos Development Corp., received $750,000 in 2005 to build dozens of homes.  Six years later, Kairos has not built a single house.

The only realistic expectation here is to realize that the past is a clear indication of the future.  Housing subsidy recipients tend to remain recipients.  The federal housing morass is a fly trap that brings clients in and keeps them there.  Unfortunately, taxpayers, including some working poor, are on the hook for this scheme. 
 

Federal housing projects tend to be bastions of political support for the Corruptocrats' theft-welfare vote buying apparatus.  Perhaps taxpayers should applaud such blithering incompetence.  Better yet, we should simply de-fund HUD altogether and take with it Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Ginnie Mae.  The $50 billion per year cost should be refunded to the 50 states so that they could make their own housing decisions based upon the wishes of their respective electorates.
 

This would eliminate some of the wealth redistribution from historically red states to blue states, and voters would have a more direct voice concerning how their dollars are spent.
 

May your gods be with you.