So, that’s how you’re gonna play it.

H/T:  Instapundit.

So yeah, homeless.  Eight years of Obama and the homeless are still with us.  I’d like to know what Obama was going to do about that back in 2008.  Because whatever he said he was going to do back then either didn’t work, or was just a lie.  Like Obamacare.

Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t need to say much about homelessness because he believes, as Reagan did, that a rising tide floats all boats.  If he can turn the economic blender up to “puree,” there are going to be a lot of people who currently don’t have jobs (but want them) going back to work.

The hard-core, long-term, chronic homeless — the boats with holes in the bottom that won’t float, regardless how high the tide — are another story.  Many of them are either incapable of working or simply won’t work.  They’re the folks Reagan gets blamed for turning out of the institutions onto the street, and for good reason:  They were costing a shitton of money and wasting resources that could have been used for other patients.  That’s harsh, but it’s an economic reality.  It’s also a constitutional reality, because the “general welfare” “clause” notwithstanding, the federal government has NO AUTHORITY to operate sanitoria for citizens who can’t deal with everyday life.  That is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers, so they can’t authorize that money be spent on such things.  If anyone has the authority to do that, it’s the states, with their own money, if it fits the guidelines of their own constitutions and laws.

Reagan closed the institutions because the federal government did not have the authority to operate them, or pay for people to live in them.  Not because he was an old meanie who’d spit in the eye of any homeless man he met in the street.

Trump, likewise, takes a pragmatic approach toward such things.  He seems to understand the Constitution better than the soi-disant Constitutional scholar who’s currently occupying space and wasting good oxygen in the Oval Office.

And yet, we have to ask:  In eight years, what has Barack Obama done for the homeless?

Since they’re still around, I’m gonna say, “not much.”  It’s easy to pontificate from your comfy chair in your nice warm office about how it’s so terrible for these folks.  But ya know, Jesus said, more or less, that we’d always have poor people.  That some of them are homeless is indeed bad.  But the hard, dirty, and unavoidable fact is that quite a few of the homeless wouldn’t come in out of the cold if you gave them a free place to sleep and eat and get the occasional once-over by someone with a medical degree.  (Because we do, and they don’t, for their own reasons, most of them having to do with trust — which they ain’t got much of.)

So stick that in your bong and suck it, Mother Jones.  Or get out on the street and start helping instead of pontificating.

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