The Rent Is Too Damned Low

So says that zany HUD director, Ben Carson, who wants people receiving Section 8 housing assistance to start paying as much as triple their current rent. His reasoning, if you can call it that, is that a triple kick in the teeth by the landlord will be just like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. The moribund renters will immediately hoist themselves off their cushy catafalques of dependency, flee their apartments, and land a fantastic, good-paying job that very same day.

No matter that, unless they're elderly or disabled, most of the people who receive government rent subsidies already do work, often at two or three minimum-wage jobs -- and that, without the Section 8 vouchers, their monthly take-home pay couldn't cover the costs of food, utilities, gas and vehicle maintenance, child care and clothing.

As much as the Trump administration loves to bash the Democrats, its campaign to punish the poor builds directly upon the Clinton administration's agenda to "end welfare as we know it." The Trumpies have even dubbed it Welfare Reform 2.0, in homage to Bill Clinton's Step 1.0. The 1996 termination of cash welfare benefits effectively condemned a million and a half Americans, mostly women and children, to whole lifetimes of extreme poverty. That's defined as existing (you can't call it living) on $2 or less per day.

Not satisfied with those figures, Donald Trump signed another one of his vague orders earlier this year, calling for federal agencies to impose work requirements on people receiving food assistance and Medicaid as well as public housing assistance. At least seven states have already required Medicaid clients to either work or enroll in job training programs at their own expense if they want to continue getting health care.

The demonization of poor people as lazy "takers" even as the extremely wealthy are getting outrageously richer thanks to recent Republican tax cuts, is of course nothing new. Ben Carson, good Christian that he is, is merely following the playbook of all the missionaries before him, dividing the good and deserving poor from the bad and undeserving poor, who are selfishly sucking up all that glorious rental assistance. Rather than calling for the wealthy to be taxed more to take care of the poor, Carson and his cohort believe that the poor should be forced to share their meager resources among themselves. There are too many miserable people allegedly "gaming" the system and deliberately impoverishing their fellow poor people. Therefore, the bureaucratic system should be adjusted so as to appear more generous as it dispenses fewer dollars to a greater number of people.

Carson seems to be plagiarizing the tract of two trailblazing Victorian housing "reformists", who after investigating "the condition of the abject poor" in Dickensian London, concluded,

"An attempt must be made to relieve in some wise and practical, though very limited way, the abounding misery, whilst care is taken to prevent the abuse of charity. In this manner the injudicious and inexperienced may easily do more harm than good, pauperising the people whom they wish to help, and making hypocrites instead of Christians. To indicate what we mean we may mention one case pointed out to us of a woman who attended three different places of worship on the Sunday and some others during the week, because she obtained charitable help from all."

Lest he, too, be accused of hypocritically pauperizing the poor, Carson proposes relieving the misery by raising the rent for subsidized housing clients to 35% of their gross income, up from the current 30%. This hike would affect about half of the nearly 5 million families now receiving benefits. The very poorest of the poor -- about 712,000 households -- would end up paying $150, or three times the current cap of $50. The Number Three does have some pretty heavy mystical Christian symbolism, after all. Both Jesus and Lazarus were supposedly resurrected after three days in the tomb, Christ was on the cross for three hours, and then of course there's the Holy Trinity, and Peter denying Jesus three times, etc. and ad infinitum.

But, I digress.

 It's not fair, said Carson in a conference call with reporters, for a quarter of poor Americans to be getting housing aid when another 75% of them are on waiting lists or even dying before receiving vouchers. From the Washington Post:

   Every year, it takes more money, millions of dollars more, to serve the same number of households,” Carson said. “It's clear from a budget perspective and a human point of view that the current system is unsustainable.”

He added that decades-old rules on rent calculations are “far too confusing,” often resulting in families who earn the same income paying vastly different rent “because they know how to work the system.”

HUD wants to scrap rules allowing deductions for medical and child-care costs when determining rent, which Carson said gave some tenants an unfair advantage.

“They know how to include certain deductions that other people may not be aware of,” Carson said. “We really want to level the playing field and make it much more even for everyone.”

Carson wants to make Charles Dickens's descriptions of abject Victorian poverty come to great life again, right here in Exceptional USA. Because if he and his kleptocratic cronies can't divide poor people and pit them against one another in a violent battle for stingy government help, then what possible good does it do to have an oligarchy?

With any luck, the Democratic minority will minimize the damage, and perhaps negotiate a slightly less onerous rent increase rather than, say, agitating for the construction of more public housing stock as well as shortening the outrageously long wait times for Section 8 vouchers. In Los Angeles, for example, the list was recently reopened after having been closed to new applicants for the past 13 years.

This might also be an optimal time for the Rent Is Too Damned High Party to go totally national and mainstream. Jimmy McMillan, the New York gubernatorial candidate who quit politics a couple of years ago because he said voters are too "brainwashed," received 41,000 votes out of 4 million cast in the 2010 election.

In the customary derogatory style with which it writes about "fringe" candidates, the New York Times groused in 2015 that McMillan had had some nerve running on a tenants' rights platform when, as a Vietnam War vet, he was selfishly collecting disability payments and living rent-free in a subsidized apartment himself. Forget about the return of Charles Dickens-era living conditions for tenants in the Age of Trump, because as far as the Times was concerned, McMillan himself was nothing but one of those comical minor characters straight out of a Dickens novel.

Now, I know this might seem hard for some of you to believe, but the Times actually deemed McMillan to be even zanier than our current HUD director, whom the clownish Trump once had the chutzpah to call "sleepy" right in the middle of a campaign debate. Very serious reporter Alexander Burns wrote that incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo had cynically used McMillan to boost his own candidacy. (a ploy later used less successfully by the Clintonites, when they attempted to damage Jeb Bush by cynically triangulating and boosting Donald Trump):

In a move intended to minimize the influence of his Republican opponent, Carl P. Paladino, Mr. Cuomo insisted that a televised debate include all of the minor-party candidates running for governor. Mr. McMillan, a fast-talking performer in Dickensian costume, was a breakout star.

A “Rent Is Too Damn High” music video followed, along with appearances on cable television — a plot twist that may have presaged, in some respects, the rise of other populist entertainer-cum-candidates, like Donald J. Trump.

Well, times and political realities have certainly changed. "Send in the Clowns," once considered such a plaintive romantic song, has suddenly morphed into a victory dance with a brass band. The last election proves that anything is possible. New doors have been opened. So I think Jimmy should seriously consider staging a comeback, even this late in his career, and run against either Cuomo or Trump, if for no other reason than it would drive the New York Times utterly bonkers.