Cheap And Easy?

In response to the post I published yesterday, someone who called themselves "unimportant" said:

"All this talk is cheap and easy…are all homeless people on such a tight budget?"

So I thought I’d take the time to respond to their comment.  

First of all, the majority of America’s homeless don’t really have a budget. They’re just trying to survive day by day. Some will recycle. Some will dumpster dive hoping to find something that they can sell. Others will panhandle. And, yes, believe it or not some of them actually work full time jobs – in fact a June 2006 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless that outlines some of the problems that employed homeless face at trying to get out of homelessness.

But the person who left the comment was absolutely correct. All the talk is "cheap and easy." Unfortunately all of the cheap and easy talk is coming from Federal, State and Local governments.

The Authorized Funding Level for 2007 is only $1.6 billion. While that may seem like a large sum of money, consider that most of that funding will not actually help the homeless. The majority of it will pay the administrative costs for those agencies and organizations that provide services to the homeless. In the end, only a small percentage of the over all amount will actually "trickle" down to the homeless themselves.

Contrast that amount with how much this nation is spending on Iraq and Afghanistan each month, how much Congress will waste on "pork barrel" spending and you will see that yes, all the talk about ending homelessness in our country is just that: talk.

Even at local levels, governments are more concerned with making their communities "pretty" and "attractive" and funding for programs to help the homeless get relegated to the bottom of the list. If and when local governments do pay attention to the homeless it is for the express purpose of creating or adopting ordinances that serve only to penalize the homeless.

In my own community, to my knowledge, the city council has never met to find or develop an effective or meaningful way of helping the homeless.

Is all that talk cheap and easy?

You bet!

That’s the problem. Dealing with homelessness in our nation’s communities will take more than just talk. And it will certainly take more than just tossing out a few morsels to the homeless if and when we have time.

If we’re going to significantly reduce the numbers of homeless, we must be willing to work to achieve those ends and we must be willing to put our money where our mouth is at.

And, that IS the bottom line.