Well I think it was the prospect of hordes of homeless and starving people in the streets -- and so the spectre of "no wall high enough"-- that persuaded Republicans to go along with the level of stimulus plans that have so far been deployed in the USA versus effects of the pandemic.
Even now we are not out of the woods on housing issues. The moratorium on eviction is ending, landlords want their money, not everyone even with past unemployment assistance, a current job (and monthly checks to provide for kids in the household), can necessarily come up with back rent or mortgage payments while paying the current housing costs with utilities.
Meanwhile the housing that's being built is often not affordable, or not in the right place to house people working in lower income jobs where higher income people work or visit and expect restaurants, hotels, fast food and etc facilities to be staffed up. This puts extra stress on roads and bridges as well as public transportation facilities, on which the USA is perennially behind the curve.
And it's true that crime is rising and no one's sure what the root causes of its exacerbation are at this point. Philadephia just hit the 300 mark on homicides for this year. This is July. That's a figure that a lot of cities used to try hard to manage not to hit by year's end for god's sake. A lot of it is down to proliferation of guns. Some of it is reactive to stressors of covid-19. Vaccination efforts continue but meanwhile Rs resist Biden's efforts to improve vaccination rates, some of them getting into fear-mongering against door-to-door face to face efforts to inform people of benefits of vaccination:
A new spate of misinformation in response to federal vaccination efforts comes as the need to increase the nation’s middling vaccination rate takes on urgency in the face of the delta variant.
www.inquirer.com
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster last week sought to prohibit door-to-door vaccination outreach in his state, while North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn baselessly suggested that the canvassing would lead to the creation of a system to seize citizens’ firearms or Bibles. Tweeted Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan: “What’s next? Knocking on your door to see if you own a gun?”
That kind of stuff is not helpful. The door-knocking information provision gig is volunteer based and not some centralized operation. These guys like Cawthorn and Jordan are just opportunists looking to rouse knee-jerk reflexes via social media and keep their own names famliar in advance of the next round of elections. Their own constituents should be calling them out on this when it comes to attempts to interfere with a public health initiative.
The federal government can't micromanage big ticket items like housing or transportation or even public health campaigns, we know it's terrible at that. It can provide incentives and guidance and assistance and funds when that's what's missing.
But the Constitution does say that government's job is to provide for the general welfare of the people. It's meant to do that where it's inefficient or impossible for states to manage certain aspects of that welfare. The Republicans need to back off from their idea of shrinking government down to the point where all it does is provide a military force and diplomatic service. National security depends also on public health, which certainly includes adequate shelter and basic sustenance.
We are free to travel from state to state in the USA, but much of the population has lost economic mobility and is stuck wherever they are with whatever state laws govern their plight in terms of food, shelter and often wages as well. So it's laughable to think our mighty military, which is all volunteer, is endlessly capable in terms of its human resources to keep defending the USA abroad, when the Republican party thinks the key to everything is bootstrapping yourself from the cradle to status of an entrepreneur ready to climb high up the ladder and bitch about taxes.
So we have some problems and a lot of them are attitudinal and should not be partisan in the sense they are right now. Maybe we do need a centrist party, or at least two major parties who can get back to conducting business in civil fashion instead of ill-advisedly leading their partisans to verbal battles royal over who's a bigger piece of sh^t on Twitter or Facebook in an endless campaign of opposition to "the other side".
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www.politico.com
www.businessinsider.com
www.theatlantic.com
www.thenation.com
