Are Federal Homeless Dollars Being Invested Into a Money Pit?

by Guest Mon Mar 28, 2011 7:01 pm

Are Federal Homeless Dollars Being Invested Into a Money Pit?

Some conservative analysts are comparing the federal government's
annual financial allotment for homeless services as an exercise in
careless spending, similar to the 1980s movie, "The Money Pit."
Remember Tom Hanks and Shelley Long buying that million dollar mansion
only to find out that they had to pump in their life's savings to keep
the residence from imploding?The Government Accountability Office (GAO) announced that the federal government spent $2.9 billion for federal homeless programs in 2009, a dollar amount typically allocated each year.

In this season of a growing national budget deficit, where lawmakers are
fighting over what sort of government spending cuts should be
implemented, critics of homeless spending jumped on this GAO report.
Three billion dollars per year, and homelessness continues to soar?
Certainly the infrastructure to end homelessness is imploding, critics
state. They say that with the national cost of building a home pegged at
$200,000 per unit, 145,000 homes for the homeless could be built each
year with this money. That is a lot of homes, a lot of housed homeless people.Is the government really using its dollars to end homelessness, or is
this multi-billion dollar annual investment just another kind of
pork-barrel scheme?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-john-roberts/are-federal-homeless-doll_b_841160.html