Don's Tuesday Column

          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   4/16/2024

Homeless money folly, “tough love”

Did the Daily News or other nearby papers pick up The Wall Street Journal article: “California’s Homeless Folly”? It cited a state auditor’s conclusion that 30 programs spent $24 billion “fighting” homelessness over 5 years; they failed, and homelessness increased.

Local reporters might shed some light on our numbers and spending; let readers know if this pattern is reflected in Red Bluff or Tehama County. Over 5 years, how much of our local budgets have been devoted to the growing problem of local homelessness.

Our Legislature “charged auditor Grant Parks with reviewing the state’s homeless spending as the numbers camping on streets rise.” His report last week concluded that the state “lacks current information on the ongoing costs and outcomes of its homelessness programs…and hasn’t consistently tracked and evaluated the State’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness.”

Whether state-wide, in cities to the south, or our county’s parks and tucked away corners, I point to the core issue: That which is not prohibited is allowed, even encouraged. In our culture’s “therapeutic mentality,” the default response is to enable people to “do their thing” because of some misplaced sense of their “right” to said “thing,” even if it results—especially if it could be foreseen to result—in a degradation of public spaces and civic health.

I was once called “heartless” and “unchristian” for praising the practice, many decades ago, of law enforcement escorting bums, hobos and transients to the other side of town, telling them to keep moving. America’s towns and villages were charitable—as we should be even today—towards their/our own who fall on hard times through no fault of their own.

It was perhaps an expression of “tough love” to acknowledge that the resources of any community are limited and must be delegated to those most deserving; that didn’t and doesn’t apply to transients who devote their limited intelligence to avoiding work, figuring out how to get drugs, and getting by on the misplaced kindness of others. “Others” have finite resources, and priorities for their own families and neighbors.

We live, unfortunately, in a different, more tolerant world where being taken advantage of is, as a rural town and area, apparently preferable to telling people “No!” and keeping our public spaces free of lay-abouts, druggies and leering strangers. We should be able to enjoy said spaces while letting children safely run within parents’ sight without risk of needles or human filth.

It should be uncontroversial to demand that anyone “camping” in public spaces—or being housed in publicly provided facilities—be vetted and identified so their history and record with law enforcement poses no risk to others.

If this is current policy, good. We should insist on a drug- and alcohol-free lifestyle for those in public care. If suffering from mental/emotional maladies, they should be no threat to others or be removed from our city or county. Surely, some of that $24 billion can be spent on facilities to house them under supervision. If judges are inclined to say no to involuntary measures, find judges with better judicial sense or let judges take them into their own homes. To let homeless advocates, lawyers and “mollycoddling” judges have the last word is insanity.

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A brief EV follow-up: Near our home in Bend, OR, is a Tesla dealership, complete with a shiny, impressive inventory. Driving a side street, we saw dozens of identical, unsold blue Teslas in a vacant lot. Witness low EV inventories on Tehama County car lots. However, Gavin Newsom’s pipe dream, with planned enforcement by state power, of replacing our reliable gas-engine vehicles—big rigs included, unbelievably—indicates preposterous, climate-crisis-induced lunacy. Biden’s EPA/EV mandate is even more ludicrous.

In “Behind EV Push, a Wealth Transfer From Red to Blue Regions” (theepochtimes.com), we find evidence that federal mandates are effectively a form of “class warfare” benefiting urban states at the expense of rural states.

That “zero emissions” EV car requires a battery; a typical EV battery requires: Lithium (12 tons of rock); Cobalt (5 tons of rock); Nickel (3 tons of mineral); Copper (12 tons of ore); and over 500 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. The Caterpillar 994A used for earthmoving consumes hundreds of gallons of diesel in 12 hours, plus all the other equipment—all to allow an Electric Vehicle to be marketed as “zero emissions.”

Odds and ends: At this point in 2020 (Trump’s 3^rd year): gasoline and natural gas were down 2%; electricity, groceries, used cars, and transportation were up 3% or less; apparel was only up 0.6%.

Now, in Biden’s 3^rd year: gasoline is up nearly 50%; natural gas is up nearly 30%; electricity, groceries, used cars, and transportation are up between 20% and 30%.

Biden’s DHS has flown around 13,000 illegal aliens from other nations to LA and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the share of all US tech-industry jobs located in California has fallen to the lowest level in a decade; cue departing moving vans and tax revenue from high-paying jobs.