Man, if I could say, “every homeless Veteran isn’t,” I would retire, happy as a Clam. Ain’t gonna happen, as you and I both know. Vested interests will see that it isn’t and won’t. They’re is big bucks to be earned.

If you ever have anyone who purports to claim knowledge of the Homeless world to you, point them off to me, please! I will be happy to be your resource to inform them professionaly that they have important congitive organs placed firmly up their own excretory canals!

We should be addressing the causes, not the effects.

Of course. Those of us in this world know about the “use or lose” problem. If you don’t use 100%+ of your grant for *this* year, next year’s will be cut. It’s irrelevant if that money actually is applied to your target population.

This carries up the food chain. If you don’t fund said endeavors, you are not with the plan, not on the same page as everyone else. So you have to keep feeding the system, increasingly. Else you lose your “street cred” in the governmental world.

I swear, being experienced in the social service world, I could accomplish 100% of the same goals with 25% of the funds. But it’s become a feeding trough, both for those within it, and those who fund it.

A lot of highly paid bureaucrats managing lucrative contracts with even higher paid consultants to produce studies that go nowhere except a high level presentation followed by a trip to the agency library shelf.

“…Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the War on Poverty in 1964…”

I remember when LBJ first said that poverty would be a priority of his administration, the news media pointed out a poor black family living in a shack on his Texas ranch and working for him for peanuts. LBJ’s response? He sent the man a carload of used presidential business suits.

“Has the trillion-dollar expenditure reduced inequality?”

People forget that the truly wealthy are powerful enough through their wealth to keep inequality from being reduced. After all, no one dealt four aces agrees to a re-deal. But is equality a desirable goal? [I am assuming economic equality here.] As economist Vilfredo Pareto once said, “If people are made equal, they will be made equal at a low level.”

Nowhere does anyone define success as a program that works so successfully it is no longer needed. This is why bureaucrats aggressively seek new food stamp recipients, for example, if not enough people are currently enrolled in their program despite their efforts to pull in as many recipients as they can. It will cause their funding to be cut the next FY. “Success” puts the bureaucrats out of business.

Change is only possible with a paradigm shift that changes the rules. This comes about occasionally when the force of a president’s will reshapes key aspects of the Washington mentality. Mostly, it happens when the existing situation is so screwed up and financially bankrupt that change cannot be talked-away or avoided.

For the remaining 99.9% of the time, it’s business as usual. Limited accountability gets introduced here and there; bureaucrats and other vested interests seek to sabotage it; the reformers eventually tire or lose power, and we revert to business as usual.

I’m not saying I like this process, just that institutionally it IS the process.

Most shelters merely warehouse people, and do little to assist them in resolving their issues and getting back to productive lives. For example, many if not most shelters are “wet” shelters, in which inebriation, as long as it’s low-key and you cause no trouble, is OK.

But you are never allowed any stability, cannot count on a place to stay on any given day. How then does this assist people in getting training, finding jobs, housing? Putting shattered lives back together?

All of these consume tremendous amounts of money for little social benefit.

Mind you, some programs actually *do* work well. Those who truly can no longer work are assisted, and those who can still work are guided towards returning to the workforce. But they are the exception, not the rule. Where I work is one of the exceptions, but we are near-unique in that way.

I am certain those who came up with these programs meant well. However, while long on intent, they are woefully short of execution.

“..how do we kill these programs and come up with an approach..”

With all due respect: To the later, I would say the approach was written in 1776 by Adam Smith and some guys on this side of the Atlantic. There is little to “Come up with”

To the killing the program, that will have to come from the people being injured by the system. That would be you and me, but more importantly, the real victims as described by Bill Cosby and others. Unfortunately, they are not ready to do this, as they are busy rooting for Obama.

And Edgar: Is the money taken by force from fathers and given to “single mothers”, with a cut going to the government included in your figures?