Published: March 25, 2009
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
An encampment of tents under an overpass in Fresno
FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of a homeless outreach center here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.
“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”
Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shanty towns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”
I’ve been writing about this for years. The US, unlike Europe or Japan, has little safety net for unemployed. Benefits run out after a few months and extensions usually total less than a year. Self- employed have no benefits, neither do those ‘fired for cause’ or who ‘quit’. Because state government benefits are handled like ‘insurances’ the amount of claims drive the costs for businesses. These are now contesting unemployment claims.
This is just the beginning. There will be more shantytowns. There will be more struggling and hungry homeless. Our economic slide has just begun.
The government is simply not doing its job. While it subsidizes the bankers, the bankers put more and more people out onto the streets. The policies of this government are perverse. It is working people – who are currently being laid off and evicted from their houses – who create capital that the bankers make personal use of. It is working people who make wealth – not the government – which can only ‘counterfeit’ fiat money.
The American public has a covenant with its government; do perform the tasks that the Constitution requires it to do. In return, the public will pay the government taxes. Believe it or not, the public is entitled to performance and has in its hand the means to guarantee results; the checkbook of every American taxpayer.
Perhaps a taxpayers’ strike is necessary to gain the attention of the government; to point it in the right direction and compel to do the right things,
The government needs to eliminate the bailouts of the wealthy who can fend for themselves as well as investigate finance and government wrongdoing. For the government to take a pittance and provide a safety net for those who are unemployed on account of that wrongdoing. This is simple justice.