Old and homeless

According to a small article by Carole Fleck in the “Your Money” section of the AARP Bulletin for October (print edition), about 1.6 million people were homeless in America between October 2007 and October 2008, and older people are making up an increasing proportion of this number.

Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, says “More people are becoming homeless when they’re older, which is new. The programs that inoculated older people against homelessness are not keeping up.”

That latter statement should not come as a big surprise, I suppose, after 8 years of a government set on destroying the New Deal.

Los Angeles has about 73,000 homeless, of whom about 4,000 are 62 and over. Nearly two-thirds of these elderly homeless have Social Security income but it isn’t enough in an area where housing is very expensive. People are living in their cars even if they’re employed because $8 an hour isn’t enough to keep them housed.

Homelessness is encroaching more and more into opulent neighborhoods, too.

In Kansas’ suburban Johnson County, where residents have the highest median income in the state, a shelter run by the Salvation Army is operating at full capacity and has a waiting list …In parts of central and south Florida, low- and middle-income workers are increasingly occupying shelters. The same is true in Cleveland, where emergency shelters are housing more people from higher-income exurbs like Brecksville and North Royalton.

Ironically, the thousands of homes and commercial properties lost to foreclosure and abandoned in Cleveland are serving a new purpose—providing shelter for many of the homeless who are trying to stay off the streets…

Often the response of local authorities is to pass laws that make it illegal to be homeless. Another way, I guess, of making our jails do the job our social service agencies used to do.

Oh well, we’ve had a lovely war and enriched a lot of private contractors and bailed us out a lot of CEOs of investment banks. No regrets.

Speaking of which, some links compliments of lambert:

He Told Us to Go Shopping. Now the Bill is Due. Andrew Bacevich:

It’s widely thought that the biggest gamble President Bush ever took was deciding to invade Iraq in 2003. It wasn’t. His riskiest move was actually one made right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he chose not to mobilize the country or summon his fellow citizens to any wartime economic sacrifice. Bush tried to remake the world on the cheap, and as the bill grew larger, he still refused to ask Americans to pay up. During this past week, that gamble collapsed, leaving the rest of us to sort through the wreckage.

…

But in less obvious ways, the economic crisis also renders a definitive verdict on the country’s post-9/11 national security strategy. The “go to Disney World” approach to waging war has produced large, unanticipated consequences. When the American people, as instructed, turned their attention back to enjoying life, their hankering for prosperity without pain deprived the administration of the wherewithal needed over the long haul to achieve some truly ambitious ends.

Even today, the scope of those ambitions is not widely understood, in part due to the administration’s own obfuscations. After September 2001, senior officials described U.S. objectives as merely defensive, designed to prevent further terrorist attacks. Or they wrapped America’s purposes in the gauze of ideology, saying that our aim was to spread freedom and eliminate tyranny. But in reality, the Bush strategy conceived after 9/11 was expansionist, shaped above all by geopolitical considerations.

…

Yet there is an economic lesson here too. “We have more will than wallet,” the president’s father said in 1989 during his own inaugural address. That is again painfully true today. The 2008 election finds the Pentagon cupboard bare, the U.S. Treasury depleted, the economy in disarray and the average American household feeling acute distress. Profligacy at home and profligacy abroad have combined to produce a grave crisis. This time around, telling Americans to head for Disney World won’t work. The credit card’s already maxed out, and the banks are refusing to pony up for new loans.

Statement on Congressional Approval of Bailout. Dean Baker:

This is the first time in the history of the United States that the president has sought to provoke a financial panic to get legislation through Congress. While this has proven to be a successful political strategy, it marks yet another low point in American politics.

It was incredibly irresponsible for President Bush to tell the American people on national television that the country could be facing another Great Depression. By contrast, when we actually were in the Great Depression, President Roosevelt said that, “we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”

It was even more irresponsible for him to seize on the decline in the stock market five hours later as evidence that his bailout was needed for the economy. President Bush must surely understand, as all economists know, that the daily swings in the stock market are driven by mass psychology and have almost nothing to do with the underlying strength in the economy.

As Lambert says: NOW NOW NOW NOW! FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR! It’s been the theme of the Bush administration and to our shame it always seems to work.

And/or as Mannion says:

I think my mistake was trying to understand this as an economics problem.

That was like looking at what happened to New Orleans after Katrina as a meteorological problem.

It’s a Look at the bastards who are in charge problem.

Possibly related posts:

The NEA has a new chairman

Public anger (more on the revolution nobody noticed)

Spicy mustard, how evil

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