Showing posts with label Homeless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homeless. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

New York City is currently spending $394 per day on every single migrant. That comes to $144,000 per year per migrant, which is of course far more than Americans make with actual jobs.

Why are GDP and job number jobs numbers defying slow-down predictions?

Easy.

Because most new jobs are disguised government spending.  They don't create anything, of course, but they sure do spend and they are about to get a lot worse.  A few days ago The Wall Street Journal ran an excellent article on what they call the "Welfare Industrial Complex."  They kick off asking, "What's driving America's job growth?" concluding it's government social assistance and associated healthcare.  In fact, more than half, 56% of the 2.8 million net new jobs created last year, were precisely that--government social assistance and healthcare.  In Blue states, like New York and Illinois, those welfare jobs make up literally more than all the job gains.  So 113% in Michigan; the same in Illinois, and 121% in New York.  In other words, their real productive economy is actually shrinking.  Without those jobs from just the last year alone, nationwide we would be close to 5% unemployment; if you add back the millions of workers who dropped out during COVID, we'd be closer to 8% unemployment. 

Now, welfare spending is GDP.  To be sure, it will get Paul Krugman popping the bubbly but it is not economic growth; it's not making us richer.  In fact, it's economic deconstruction, converting formerly productive people into the permanent wards of society.  Indeed, if you go into poor areas in many of these states, you'll see literally nothing but welfare services, so nonprofits, Medicaid-paid health clinics, with a tiny sprinkling of gas stations, and takeout with bulletproof glass.  So the productive economy is actually shrinking, but the GDP numbers hide it.  All pretty dire but brace yourself because there's a lot more to come as literally millions of new welfare cases pour in wholesale from what was formerly known as the border. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that New York City is currently spending $394 per day on every single migrant.  That's the price of a nice Disney vacation.  That comes to $144,000 per year per migrant, which is of course far more than Americans make with actual jobs, possibly more since I can only imagine the games government activists play to hide the money they spend.  Add these imported millions to the hundreds of thousands of "drug-addled and mentally ill homeless living on the street," that is a quote from the WSJ, and you've got the makings for some very impressive consumer spending.  

Those nosebleed trillions are just the start since decades of experience have shown that the more government spends on welfare, the more people go on welfare.  In Joe Biden's first stimulus bill, for example, they poured out nearly $43 billion in housing subsidies to end homelessness as we know it.  

So what happened?  

Well, the homeless population shot up by 85,000.  While homeless don't cost as much as migrants, they're just $86,000 a year again per person, which is also a very respectable salary anywhere in America; again, that's taking the activists who run government welfare at their word.   As the WSJ notes, progressive government doesn't do anything on the cheap.  Indeed they don't.  Los Angeles is currently spending $837,000 per unit to build housing for the homeless.  So at $144k a year per migrant and $86k per ruined life times millions, you get the makings of some fantastic consumer spending numbers even as the economy and the treasury are gutted.  

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

"I mean if we're going to be realistic, they pay you to be homeless here"

Michael Shellenberger argues

For years, the sidewalks outside the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco’s SoMa district have been clogged with drug dealers and homeless addicts. On any random day, as in the above video that Public shot, you might see EMTs carting away an overdose victim, while swarms of addicts around them continue to smoke meth and fentanyl on the curbside. 
But not this week. Suddenly, the sidewalks on 7th and Mission are spotless, as are streets all over the vicinity of the Moscone Convention Center. 
On Saturday, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference got underway. On Wednesday, President Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping will be in attendance. So the city has pushed all the dealers, addicts, and tent encampments out of the neighborhood and cordoned off much of the area behind 10-foot fences, creating a Potemkin Village of cleanliness and order. 
The sudden change has been head-spinning for those who have watched for years as politicians have promised and failed repeatedly to fix the problem. When now-Governor Gavin Newsom was elected San Francisco’s mayor almost exactly twenty years ago, he pledged to end chronic homelessness in the city within a decade. We’re now 10 years out from that deadline and the problem has only gotten worse. 
“Open-air drug dealing and using has been going on for years without the city taking necessary action,” said Randy Shaw, head of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. “It’s not meaningfully better today than when Mayor Breed issued her Emergency Declaration for the Tenderloin two years ago.” 
But then last week, seemingly overnight, one of the largest concentrations of open-air drug dealing and public camping in the city, in the SoMa district, vanished into thin air. The crackdown was, in part, to accommodate President Xi, one of the most singularly responsible people alive for the addiction crisis city workers were working double time to conceal. The fentanyl on America’s city streets is manufactured by Mexican drug cartels out of precursor chemicals created in legal, above-ground Chinese labs. China has allowed its lethal fentanyl industry to persist and thrive, in a kind of Opium War in reverse. “Whereas China has gone to war with other drugs that have a demand in China, such as methamphetamines,” New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith said in 2018, “it has conspicuously failed to launch a similar crackdown on fentanyl, which has no demand in China.” 
Yet somehow, Xi’s arrival in San Francisco changed everything. How did the city suddenly achieve what it has been unable to accomplish for decades? And will things return to how they were as soon as the heads of state leave town? Or is there room for optimism?

This guy says that

McCarthy has highest crime rate in CA in Bakersfield. #8 in the nation.

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

A homeless man in Portland told Kevin Dahlgren that the city of Billings, Montana. was offering one-way tickets to homeless sanctuary cities.