It’s about dang time.

Nearly 30 million Americans who got extra government help with grocery bills during the pandemic will soon see that aid shrink — and there’s a big push to make sure they’re not surprised.

 

Officials in 32 states and other jurisdictions have been using texts, voicemails, snail mail, flyers and social media posts — all in multiple languages — to let recipients know that their extra food stamps end after February’s payments.

 

“One of the scenarios you don’t want to see is the first time they’re aware of it is in the checkout line at the grocery store,” said Ellen Vollinger, an official with the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit organization.

 

For the average recipient, the change will mean about $90 less per month, though for many, it could be much more, an analysis shows. Benefits will return to usual levels, which are based largely on a household’s income, size and certain expenses, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

After a rough few months in 2020, most of the country returned to work and the nation has enjoyed a record low unemployment rate for the past two years. There is absolutely no reason that this money should have been wasted for this long.

I was watching the local news last night and they had a story about this. A young, healthy looking, single, overweight woman with beautifully manicured nails was bemoaning the change in benefits. Am I judging? Yes. When I am buying your food, I get to judge your life choices.

Sound familiar?

Yet even those on the liberal Left now grudgingly agree that they are rooted in the country’s disastrously failed immigration policy — which in recent years opened Sweden’s borders. Some 2 million immigrants (20 per cent of the entire population), now live in Sweden, often from the most troubled parts of Asia and Africa — and the country failed to plan for the immense difficulties of integrating them into society.

 

Many of the offspring of these migrants have morphed dangerously into a lost generation who are effectively stateless.

 

Though they were born here, many don’t feel remotely Swedish, yet have no allegiance to their parents’ homelands, either. Their alienation and discontentment smouldered for several years.

 

But in recent weeks it has erupted with a terrifying upsurge in ultra-violent gang crime and, with its hand-wringing justice system, which many feel prioritises young offender’s rights over those of their victims, Sweden evidently has no fix.

 

Twenty years ago, gun crime was almost non-existent here. Today, the grisly murders we see in Scandi-Noir TV series are no longer fictional. Sweden is awash with real-life crime podcasts, documentaries and books.

First World countries are importing Third World populations out of some guilt or savior complex. The results are obvious.

To be fair, several sides are guilty of jumping the gun before the facts are known. It would be nice if we could all agree to wait 48 hours after any tragic event before assigning our favorite narrative. Your narrative might be true, but that doesn’t mean that every incident is validation.

Despite police not releasing the suspect’s identity or race, some liberals on Twitter were quick to pin the horror on white supremacy and anti-Asian hate before all the facts were known.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tweeted: “We must stand up to bigotry and hate wherever they rear their ugly heads, and we must keep working to stop gun violence.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Saturday’s shooting was “A horrific example of needless gun violence. With bigotry toward AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) individuals as a possible motive.”

Meanwhile, #StopAsianHate many Twitter users condemned the violence, punctuating their tweets with “#StopAsianHate.”

This is the way.

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio – This Ohio city has a message for homeless people: You are not welcome here.

 

In Middletown, a city of 51,000 north of Cincinnati, officials opposed the expansion of a center that treats homeless people struggling with addiction.

 

The city created a “homeless crisis team,” which included the assistant city manager and police chief, to sweep the downtown and arrest people without housing. Over six weeks, the team arrested 94 people.

 

“We don’t want to make this a comfortable place for them to live. Get them off the streets to where they can’t live by their rules,” City Councilmember Zack Ferrell said in a Facebook comment to a resident.

City leaders across the U.S. have attempted a variety of measures to deal with people without housing on their streets: Los Angeles declared a state of emergency and plans to get over 17,000 people into housing this year; New York City officials are now authorized to involuntarily commit people; Cincinnati cleared encampments.

 

In Columbus, efforts to combat homelessness are led by the Community Shelter Board. The nonprofit helps about 15,000 people each year find shelter and permanent supportive housing.

 

Few experts on the topic recommend Middletown’s approach, saying it’s ineffective and, in the long run, more costly. Formerly homeless people interviewed by The Enquirer said recovery housing rather than time in jail was crucial for them to become self-sufficient residents of Middletown.

 

Ferrell told The Enquirer he believes the Middletown’s efforts to sweep downtown have had a “major impact.”

 

“On almost an everyday basis right now, I have citizens reaching out to me, telling me they feel more safe and comfortable to walk their animals or walk to different downtown businesses,” he said.

Screw the experts. It’s not the job of the good citizens of Middleton to help vagrants become self-sufficient. They can go somewhere else to become self-sufficient and then move back. More often than not, people will not change their ways until they hit rock bottom. The failure of our public policy is that we have lined the rock bottom with pillows so that people are more comfortable living on the streets doing drugs than they are getting cleaned up.

Meh.

The White House’s strategy centers around a concept known as Housing First, a relatively new approach to homelessness that has shown some significant promise since it was pioneered a few decades ago. As the name suggests, Housing First is built around the principle of providing people with long-term housing before starting services to address their mental health, addiction or other challenges they face. Many anti-homelessness programs require participants to take part in counseling or prove they’re sober in order to receive benefits. Under Housing First, these supports are all voluntary.

 

When Housing First was first attempted in the early 1990s, it represented a sharp departure from what had been the previous consensus on homelessness — which was built around a so-called treatment-first approach, based on the belief that people needed to achieve a certain level of stability before providing them with housing.

 

Over the years, there have been several examples of cities that have significantly reduced homelessness using the Housing First strategy. Among the most successful is Houston, where homelessness has dropped more than 60% since 2011 thanks to a program that placed more than 25,000 people in long-term supportive housing. Housing First has helped reduce homelessness in places as diverse as Utah and Georgia, as well as cities in Canada and across Europe.

 

But there are also examples of places where Housing First doesn’t appear to have worked. During the past two years, California has spent $14 billion to combat homelessness — most of it on Housing First programs — but the number of people living on the street has continued to rise. Growing concerns about homelessness have become a major political issue in a number of liberal big cities in recent years, in some cases prompting local leaders to rely more on police in their response.

By definition, Housing First solves homelessness because it moves people off the street and into homes. It does not, however, solve the underlying issues that cause homelessness (mental illness, drug use, etc.). It just moves their plight out of sight at huge taxpayer expense.

As with all big issues, there are several interlocking causes, but this is certainly one of them.

The reasons often offered include a moderate climate, the availability of generous welfare benefits, mental health and drug abuse. However, a lengthy and meticulously sourced article in the current issue of Atlantic magazine demolishes all of those supposed causes.

 

Rather, the article argues persuasively, California and other left-leaning states tend to have the nation’s most egregious levels of homelessness because they have made it extraordinarily difficult to build enough housing to meet demands.

 

Author Jerusalem Demsas contends that the progressive politics of California and other states are “largely to blame for the homelessness crisis: A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue.

 

“Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups … But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple.”

 

Demsas singles out Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area as examples of how environmentalists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups and left-leaning organizations joined hands to enact a thicket of difficult procedural hurdles that became “veto points” to thwart efforts to build the new housing needed in prosperous “superstar cities.”