As a housing and eviction crisis looms in America, a Senate committee voted recently to give the Pentagon an extra $25 billion that they didn't even ask for. The amount of back rent owed in the United States is only $21 billion, meaning that we absolutely could have paid off all this debt but we made the conscious choice NOT to do this. No matter who is in charge, helping Americans in need never seems to be a real priority for the vast majority of our elected officials. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.
Link - https://www.newsweek.com/eviction-moratorium-expires-americans-owe-20-billion-unpaid-rent-1613866
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Recently a Senate committee decided to allocate an additional $25 billion to the defense department, to the Pentagon, that they hadn't originally asked for in their more than $700 billion budget. Senate committee gets together and just says, you know what, you guys have been such good players here. Let's give you an extra 25 billion, 25 billion. I want you to remember that number because I'm gonna throw another number out here for you. $21.3 billion, $21.3 billion is obviously less than $25 billion. $21.3 billion is the amount of back rent owed by Americans through the pandemic. And as we all know this past week and the eviction moratorium expired yesterday, Biden announced that he was going to try to put another eviction ban in place. So that's a good positive development here. However, I can't help, but think that we've got enough money to where an eviction moratorium might be a moot point. How about we as a country just suck it up and we pay these people's rent?
That's a better way to prevent eviction, right? Because then you also get to placate and I hate to placate these people because they're greedy scumbags, but you get to placate all these mega corporations that own these housing complexes and apartment complexes and condos and homes across the country. They still get their money. So then they don't have anything to about. But instead, we say, you know what Pentagon, have 25 extra billion. We could solve the housing eviction crisis with that money. But nah, you guys go ahead and take it instead. Here's another kicker. I'm gonna throw another number out at you. $46 billion, $46 billion is how much Congress actually allocated earlier this year as part of the stimulus package for rental assistance here in the United States. Unfortunately, most of that money hasn't made it out to any renters in this country because it was given to the states instead. So the states at their discretion get to decide who, who, who's going to get the money and how you qualify for it.
And, you know, how much you're going to get, because they're sure as hell not going to give you enough to pay off all the back rent that you owe. This is, this is mind numbing at this point. We have the money. Hell, we already have the 46 billion, which would pay for the back rent more than twice, and maybe have a couple dollars left over to go, you know, buy ice cream for everybody. I don't care. I don't know. All I know is that any crisis that we're seeing in this country that's going to come from this eviction explosion if it happens, depending on what Biden's able to do with his new ban, it was preventable. It was 100% preventable because we could have paid for these people's rent. We could have paid for another 18 months of their rent. And with the additional 25 billion that we gave the Pentagon, hell, you know what, we could have thrown in an additional 18 months just to make sure everybody can get back on their feet. That's four and a half year's worth of rent and over three years of it is still just sitting in accounts in the states.
Some of it being misappropriated. Some of it being outright denied because there's really no oversight once you hand it off to the states, they get to choose. Not good enough. It needs to be a congressional program.
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