Sean Hayden wrote: ↑Sat Oct 12, 2024 9:23 pm
That sounds good. However, the US government does spend what seems like a lot to provide relief. Biden requested about 73 billion for HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and got close to 70. That's an increase of 8 billion over 2023. That money is to be spent:
to maintain all existing rental assistance while increasing efforts to reduce homelessness, connect people to both housing and health care, and remove barriers to housing opportunities and development, including unnecessary administrative burdens.
FY24 THUD Bill Summary
Final FY24 Spending Bill for HUD Programs Enacted
Still, only about 25 percent of those eligible for rental assistance will receive it!
Funding Limitations Create Widespread Unmet Need for Rental Assistance
How can there be so many people that need help paying rent? A lot of solutions focus on housing, but what about income? I don't know for sure, but it looks like a terrible time for many workers. Part-time is the default, and many potentially aren't earning a living wage (
44 percent not paid a living wage).
Same here. The majority of working-age benefits and assistance doesn't go to the unemployed but to people in work. Tax rebates for low earners subsidise businesses that pay poverty wages. Rent support schemes subsidise landlords. Govt schemes that help first-time buyers by matching their deposit subsidise institutional lenders, increasing their profits while reducing their exposure to risk. All this and more besides transfers resources from the govt to those operating at the top end of the income distribution.
Changes to the tax system since the 80s now sees top earners paying less tax as a proportion of their income than those at the bottom, while their assets incur no tax liability until they're sold - at which point they're taxed at a lower rate than income. The money that flows out of govts into society as spending has a quantifiable multiplying effect in the general economy, but those gains no longer come back to the govt, with interest, via the tax system - to be reinvested in public services, infrastructure, R&D etc - but are increasingly diverted and hoarded by the asset-rich. At the same time those very same people are the one's calling for further deregulation of the labour and housing markets, the privatisation of national assets, 'small government' etc.
When
63% of US workers say they couldn't meet an emergency bill of $500 the left needs to explain that the threat to ordinary working people's economic security and material well-being doesn't come from those walking across the border but from those taking private jets to their superyachts in the med for the weekend.
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"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice.
There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
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"This is how humanity ends; bickering over the irrelevant."
Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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