What's screwy, although predictable, is you want only to preach, whine, and point fingers at the homeless epidemic in this nation. Thinking, doing and fixing are outside the realm of possible.
How would *you* end this:
First, you will never - nor should you ever - try to end
all homelessness. As a very wise man once said, the poor will always be with us. Guaranteeing there will be no homelessness at all requires a government promise of housing for everyone, including the able-bodied who deliberately choose not to work.
Second, out of all the theoretical solutions out there, Trump is picking the most big government one possible.
He's having the federal government dictate internal policies to cities, which he can't constitutionally do. If the cities wish to let the homeless continue occupying their public spaces, there isn't a a damn thing the federal government can do about it. But Trump doesn't know about that, probably because he never cracked open a book about the federal government is entire lifetime.
Second, he is setting up massive, centrally controlled federal boondoggles on federal land that will be putting the taxpayer permanently on the hook for supporting a bunch of addicts and mentally ill people.
It's not only massive federal overreach, but naive in the extreme to think that the homeless are going to be shuffled willingly off to the boonies. But even if they did, once they get there, they will of course trash, defecate in, and otherwise destroy the properties our tax dollars went to build. It is an abominably stupid idea. But Trump goes with it because he just thinks he can do whatever he wants is President. So he is showing himself to be both ignorant, and a fool. Either that, or a sleazy used car salesman who knows that most of what he is telling the public is a lie. Pick your poison.
The problem is
primarily one that has to be handled at the state and local level because they are the ones that have legal control over the property on which this is happening. As long as the people in those areas continue electing government officials willing to tolerate this, there is not a damn thing that can be done about it. So what a president could do is use the bully pulpit to point out what the state and local governments should be doing. But
persuading others and converting them to his point of view has never been Trump's forte.
However,
the single most important thing the federal government could do to address this is a massive federal crackdown on drugs, because drug abuse, especially in conjunction with mental illness, is the single biggest cause of those people being on the streets in the first place in those encampments.
So you're talking a significant step up not only in street level enforcement by federal drug agents, but also a
significant increase in penalties for drug dealing. As in death penalty for large scale dealing, long prison sentences for other dealers, and prison sentences for a lot of users.
That is the
one federal mechanism that can get those people actually off the streets so the streets can be cleaned up.
By the way, isn't Trump the guy who pardoned or commuted the sentences of a bunch of people in federal prison for drug offenses before he left office?
