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.
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.
The site design could be better though. Human brains don't understand how insanely large those numbers are without a visualization.