Baffling bullshit uses homeless veterans

This country has allowed politics to take over sanity and replace bullshit where truth used to be. It is one thing to have a political position and quite another thing to lie about it. Frankly, the expression "if you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit" applies to gullible reporters when they don't have a clue and to editors when they are even more clueless.

This is a great example of allowing BS to go unchallenged.

This is the latest figure for homeless veterans.

Homeless Veterans: Whose Responsibility?
Published: October 8, 2012

Veterans and their advocates in southern California, the epicenter of veterans’ homelessness, are angry that President Obama and the Veterans Affairs Department have not built a single bed for homeless disabled veterans on the 400 acres the government owns in West Los Angeles, property that was deeded to the federal government for that very purpose in 1888.

They are right that Mr. Obama and the Veterans Affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, have nothing to show for their promises to tackle the problem. But then neither did presidents named Reagan, Bush and Clinton, nor the long string of Veterans Affairs secretaries who served under them.

The campus has a hospital and outpatient services, but no long-term supportive housing for the desperately ill men and women who live and die on the streets, abandoned by the government they served. The circle of blame is wider than the executive branch.
read more here

NATIONAL COALITION FOR HOMELESS VETERANS
How many homeless veterans are there?

Although flawless counts are impossible to come by – the transient nature of homeless populations presents a major difficulty – HUD estimates that 67,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Over the course of a year, approximately twice that many experience homelessness. Only eight percent of the general population can claim veteran status, but nearly one-fifth of the homeless population are veterans.

When I updated my book to make it available online in 2004, these were the numbers of homeless veterans.

STATE FUNDED HOMELESS

BEDS.............Homeless veterans
AK 7.............350
AL 27............5,275
AR 80............4,389
AZ 219...........6,190
CA 2,713.......49,250
CO 72............3,457
CT 137...........2,900
DC 175...........9,403
DE 15.............600
FL 492............19,231
GA 81.............9,852
HI 118...........3,000
IA 17............1,600
ID 10............400
IL 158...........19,943
IN 138...........1,600
KS 27............1,259
KY 153...........2,100
LA 186...........4,620
MA 477...........2,700
MD 126...........2,800
ME 3..............1,000
MI 69.............5,171
MN 42...........1,961
MO 96...........13,549
MS 40............1,400
MT 17...........320
NC 247..........6,805
ND 48...........1,100
NE 12............560
NH 72............437
NJ 193............8,300
NM 26............3,600
NV 219..........5,500
NY 354..........44,700
OH 258..........9,697
OK 42............1,750
OR 143...........8,450
PA 206..........10,166
RI 23..............400
SC 50.............3,850
SD 16.............430
TN 230...........2,972
TX 256...........19,640
UT 114...........575
VA 98.............2,450
VT 10.............1,200
WA 167..........6,850
WI 209............1,132
WV 52............531
WY 31............1,175
PR 0................50
total 8771.......316640

You can claim anything you want but when it comes to homeless veterans among other issues with veterans, Obama has done a lot more than other Presidents. It is high time we actually figured out who is really to blame for what is not getting done.

CONGRESS

Dems, GOP Fight Over Homeless Vets
Would House Republicans' budget leave 10,000 vets in streets to 'die'?
Posted on April 8, 2011

Summary
In the fog of a historic budget battle, Democrats are exaggerating the impact of proposed GOP cuts on homeless military veterans.

A GOP budget bill approved by the House in February would not fund 10,000 new housing vouchers for homeless veterans this fiscal year as Congress has done every year since 2008. The proposal has led to false and misleading charges and countercharges over what would happen to homeless veterans under the GOP plan.

Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California wrongly claimed the GOP bill would result in "10,000 veterans who literally could be in the streets and die." It's not true that the cuts will deny housing to 10,000 homeless veterans. The program has enough vouchers from previous years to carry it through fiscal year 2011. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) says the program has accumulated nearly 30,000 vouchers since its inception in 2008 and it will take until November or December for them to be used for housing veterans. That's after the 2011 fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

But, in his defense of the budget cuts, Republican Rep. Tom Latham of Iowa overstates his case when he says the program has "11,000 vouchers waiting to be used." The Veterans Administration, which jointly runs the program with HUD, says all but 2,406 of the 29,950 vouchers have either been used for housing (20,693), or assigned to veterans (6,851) who are in VA treatment programs or in various stages of obtaining housing.
read more here

Congress controls the funds for everything and this congress had no intentions of fixing anything!

Indeed, the issue of veteran homelessness is becoming increasingly important as defense spending cuts limiting vital benefits for veterans will automatically take effect in 2013, if Congress doesn't take action, according to the Center For American Progress.