Homelessness Up 48% Since 2015, Israel-Lebanon "Imminent" As 100,000+ Flee, Three Dead on U.S. Base in Jordan Due to Odd Circumstances (The Five for 01/31/24)
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Let’s dive into the news.
[one]
According to a new report from Harvard, homelessness is up 48% since 2015.
From The Daily Wire:
That’s up about 12% from the same time the previous year in 2022, the largest single-year increase ever recorded, the report says. About 71,000 more people were homeless last year than the year before.
Sky-high rent prices and inflation are partly to blame, along with the end of pandemic relief, such as eviction protections.
“Rapidly rising rents, combined with wage losses in the early stages of the pandemic, have underscored the inadequacy of the existing housing safety net, especially in times of crisis,” the Harvard report said.
The median rent in the U.S. was $1,964 in December, 23% higher since the pandemic, according to Rent.com.
The rental market is cooling, but rent prices are still much higher than they were pre-pandemic, and wage growth has not kept up.
Median weekly wages grew only 1.7% between 2019 and 2023, government figures show.
People earning between $45,000 and just under $75,000 a year saw the biggest increase in newly “cost-burdened” renters, according to the report.
In 2022, about 41% of those renters were spending between 30% and 50% of their monthly pay on housing. That’s a 5.4 percentage point increase over how many spent this much before the pandemic, and nearly double how many people did back in 2001.
While macroeconomics are tough to boil down to simple answers, it’s undeniable that the new money supply is a major factor here. If you want to know why stuff costs so much, look at how much new money the federal government put into circulation as a response to COVID.
The second factor here is that during COVID, new construction essentially stopped for periods of time, and yet there were still people moving, getting married, having kids and crossing milestones where new/larger housing is needed, but construction wasn’t keeping up. Which led to higher prices…pair it up with inflation, and people can quite literally no longer afford to live (under a roof, anyway).
Homelessness is often attributed to drugs, bad luck or laziness…but the influence of the federal government on people currently living in the streets is obvious when you look at the data.
[two]
Unless something changes very soon, Israel and Lebanon will be in an all out war, according to experts on the region.
Israeli and Hezbollah forces have traded fire across the Lebanese-Israeli border for over three months. The violence has killed about 15 Israelis, including both civilians and Israel Defense Forces members, according to The Times of Israel. The Hezbollah terrorist organization claims 171 of its members have been killed since Oct. 8, The Times of Israel reported.
On Thursday, the Israel Defense Forces reported they struck Hezbollah infrastructure in at least five locations in southern Lebanon. No deaths were immediately reported. There have since been other strikes back and forth, including one Friday when the IDF said it carried out strikes that purportedly killed four members of Hezbollah, per The Times of Israel.
Israel's north is bristling with tens of thousands of regular troops and about 60,000 reservists, an IDF official told ABC News on Wednesday.
Nearly 100,000 Israelis have evacuated the country's northern towns and tens of thousands of Lebanese living near the border have fled the fighting, according to an Israeli government estimate. An estimated 76,000 Lebanese living along the border have fled, according to the International Organization for Migration. The Lebanese government has also accused Israel of trying to create a de facto buffer zone by destroying tens of thousands of trees to deprive Hezbollah of cover.
What’s particularly concerning about the rising tensions is just how fragile the entire Middle East is, between piracy attacks at sea and assaults on U.S. bases.
[three]
…about those assaults on U.S. bases. The three U.S. troops who were killed in Jordan died in a bit of an odd accident.
Iran has denied it was behind a drone strike that killed three U.S. troops at a military base in northeast Jordan on Sunday, but an Iran-backed militia based in Iraq said it had carried out four attacks in the area.
"Regional resistance factions do not receive orders from Iran, and Iran does not interfere in the decisions of the resistance to support Palestine or defend itself," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said at a press briefing Monday.
The Iran-backed militia group Islamic Resistance in Iraq put out a statement Monday saying it had targeted a U.S. garrison at al-Tanf, just across the Jordan-Syria border from the U.S. Tower 22 base that came under attack over the weekend, as well as two other U.S. bases in the region and an Israeli oil facility.
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh on Monday blamed the attack on an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-backed militia and said the U.S. was trying to determine which one.
"Iran continues to arm and equip these groups to launch these attacks, and we will certainly hold them responsible," Singh said.
A U.S. defense official said initial reports indicated that a drone flew in low and slow at the same time that a U.S. drone was returning to the Tower 22 base from a mission. Because the auto-response features of the air defense system were turned off to avoid shooting down the returning American drone, there was little to no warning of the incoming attack.
Low-rent terrorists in the region tend to lob missiles at U.S. troops from time to time, and the only reason there were casualties this time is that the base lowered it’s defenses to not shoot down it’s own drone.
So far, the Biden administration has not signaled a use of force in retaliation against Iran, the funder and organizer…but it’s worth noting that WWI started because Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car made an unplanned turn, and drove by an assassin who had tried to blow the Austrian royal up with a failed bomb earlier in the day. Nineteen-year-old Galvio Princip was sitting in a cafe across the street mourning his failed mission when the Archduke’s car attempted a slow u-turn in front of him, and he simply pulled out a pistol and shot the Archduke in the neck.
Then, due to a series of complex events and motivations that are difficult to understand to this day, tensions rose and the first World War began.
To boil it down, 40 million people died because a chauffer made a wrong turn.
When nations are on high alert, the smallest incident can have grave consequences. We seem to have avoided them this time, but that’s no guarentee we’ll be so lucky in the future.
[four]
Congress is moving to impeach the sitting Defense Secretary for not enforcing the laws on the books in regards to the southern border.
The House Homeland Security Committee voted to advance articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas early Wednesday, teeing up a floor vote that could make Mayorkas the first Cabinet secretary to be impeached in nearly 150 years.
After a 15-plus-hour meeting that at times grew contentious, the GOP-led committee voted 18-15 along party lines to advance two impeachment articles to the House floor, where Republicans hold a slim majority. Debate and votes on the articles are expected next week.
House Republicans on Sunday released the impeachment articles against President Biden's top immigration official, accusing him of "willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law" and "breach of public trust" over the administration's handling of the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
GOP Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, the committee's chairman, said the panel had "exhausted all other options" to hold Mayorkas accountable for defying laws passed by Congress.
"We cannot allow this man to remain in office any longer," he said. "The time for accountability is now."
[five]
Finally, Mayorkas isn’t the only public official facing legal issues this week, as Corey Bush (the Senator for my own district in St. Louis) is under investigation by the Federel Elections Commission, The House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics…simultaneously.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonpartisan ethics watchdog, filed a complaint with the FEC in March 2023 requesting that it investigate Bush for potential personal use of campaign funds.
The watchdog alleged that during the 2022 cycle, Bush’s campaign paid $60,000 for security services to a person named Cortney Merritt’s, with whom she had a personal relationship before she came to Congress in 2021 and eventually married in February 2023.
The complaint, citing reports, also alleged that Merritts “does not have a St. Louis private security license, which is needed to perform security services in the area that encompasses Bush’s entire district,” and did not “appear within the government database of licensed security professionals in the Washington D.C. area.”
“At issue is this case is whether the payments made to Merritts were for a bona fide service and at a fair market rate, and if not then they would be either a impermissible gift or a payment to a family member,” the complaint reads.
In other words, Bush allegedly took donor money meant for her campaign and gave it to her then-boyfriend (now husband), which allegedly funneled into their household expenses.
Bush faces a primary challenger in April, current St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell.
Until the next one,
-sth