Why would you end homelessness though when you can simply criminalise it and send them to prison to work as slaves?
Imagine giving the DoD $800 billions in yearly budget while still has billions of surplus equipments.
This implies that they care about the homeless issue. 23 billion is a rounding error in the budget. They just don't want to fix it.
For those with a skeptical nature, I hunted down these numbers.
HUD does not provide numbers to "end homelessness", they report on the state of homelessness including an estimated census of the homeless.
Some annalists have taken these numbers and multiplied them by the cost to imprison someone, or the average cost of American housing. These estimates come out to $11-30B.
So the numbers check out. The only fault I could find with this meme's claims is that they are slightly misleading in suggesting $20B could "end homelessness" without the caveat that that's only for one year.
Of course the numbers are good.
My bullshit detector is going off for a different reason. This is an arbitrary short term vs long term comparison. The money that went to Israel wasn't going to HUD either way. As someone correctly pointed out, $20B is a rounding error here.
20 billion could go a long way to curbing homelessness.
20 billion invested in high density, low rent housing units could make housing more accessible to millions of people, including the homeless.
Remember, not all homeless people are completely jobless. Many are couch surfing or sleeping in their cars, have stables jobs, and just can’t afford rent where their job is. An apartment they can afford could do a lot for these people.
American democracy in action.
Homelessness isn't a bug in the system, its a feature. Employers need the threat of homelessness to push wages down and artificially inflate the labor supply. They need high rents to segregate portions of the community into "worthy" and "unworthy". They need car-culture to keep people isolated from one another in between work and home. They need student debt to trap people into corporate jobs, rather than setting out on their own as entrepreneurs, co-operative partners, and social workers. They need mass media to keep people more afraid of "crime" and welcoming of the "police" than they are welcoming of neighbors-in-need and hostile to state surveillance and harassment of dissidents.
The $26.7B we're sending to Israel is money towards an experiment in regional social controls and ethnic domination. If the Israelis can do it over there, the plutocrats back home can do it over here.
If you're in a poorly made boat that has a hole in it with two other people...
And you are all actively sinking in that faulty boat, about to die in the middle of the ocean...
And one of the people states they will make more holes so you all drown....
And the other wants to work to keep the boat floating enough to get to shore, but not to your ideal...
Who do you help in that moment, or do you fold your hands and sink on principle? And you understand that sinking is not a moral victory here, because you've effectively supported the person who wanted to make more holes and sink the boat.
If you don't get to shore, you won't live to attempt to sue that horrible boat company to hold them accountable and keep others from using their faulty boats. And if you don't help the person bailing out water, the person making more holes will kill you all with less effort.
The "people" above are to represent general philosophies of the two "sides" in this discussion, not insightful candidates. There is no option to truly stay neutral here, direct action or willful inaction, both have impacts that you are responsible for.
What do you do?
And you are all actively sinking in that faulty boat, about to die in the middle of the ocean...
And who does this represent in your scenario?
This post, at this time, is very obviously pointed at influencing the US election. This analogy represents the entirety of the US population eligible to vote in that election and the two dominant political parties in the US as a country with two party politics - a flawed degradation of the system originally designed to be sure, which is a separate conversation you can have, but there is an objective truth that one of two parties will win this election. Period.
That objective truth acknowledged, there is no neutral or third option here, regardless of how hard some may try to convince themselves otherwise. You have no moral high ground in the middle or to the side, you'll either vote for assured destruction or you'll vote for a chance at stopping it. You missed your chance to fundamentally shift our political structure the 4 years, and 200+ years, prior. So now we come to the table as adults, get Harris in as the better option, and then as soon as she's sworn in and has the power to do so, we fill the streets in protest and demand the immediate end to this.
trump and his people have literally talked out loud about how great the "beachfront property" will be for Israel once they annihilate Gaza and the Palestinian people. There is no maturity in the false vitriol and attempts to solicit votes for trump/stein/no vote (which are all the same enthusiast vote for trump and for the assured destruction of every last Palestinian person.
This post, at this time, is very obviously pointed at influencing the US election.
Criticizing a genocide doesn't automatically mean someone's trying to influence an election, especially considering that it been constantly criticized for over a year.
trump and his people have literally talked out loud about how great the "beachfront property" will be for Israel once they annihilate Gaza and the Palestinian people.
If both political parties geopolitical goals align with Israel, what exactly leads you to believe this is meant to influence the election? It's not telling you to vote for stien, or trump.
Maybe if people didn't go out of their ways to shield any level of criticism of their representatives we might have a more functional democracy, and maybe there would be less kids dying in Gaza.
We barely kept from defaulting on disability payments to our own veterans at the beginning of October. But we've got all the money in the world to create more suffering. Including putting our own troops in harm's way.
FFS.
But if they don't send them to Israel then what will the poor arms manufacturers do? Some still haven't bought a yacht for this month.