Now for today's edition of Funny How That Works...

[MrScorpio]

[1-Old-Man]

1. So, 5 to 6 empty houses for every homeless person in the country.

Even if we say that half of those houses have fallen into such a state of disrepair that they are uninhabitable that still leaves 3 dwellings for every homeless person.

So you gotta ask yourself, how can that be?

[freshwest]

2. This country suffers from Possession Obsession.

[AlbertCat]

8. OMG!!!!!!!!! Whadicha just say?

SOSHULISM! SOSHULISM!


or something....





I once worked at an auction where all this cut glass and crystal didn't sell..... so the family took it out back and smashed it all. If they weren't gonna make anything out of it, NOBODY was gonna get it!

Just freakin' weird!

[progressoid]

3. USA! USA! USA!

[oldandhappy]

4. wow

I did not know the numbers. Thank you. Awful.

[jtuck004]

5. In 1996 we had about 265 million people. This year about 314 million.

For almost 40 years it was the primary savings vehicle for many families, as they paid their mortgage and then sold the home when they were 65. If they were a little lucky anyway, because a full third of retirees hit 65 with less than $10,000 in assets, according to Social Security.

A hundred million, perhaps more, can no longer afford to buy a home, and the future holds no promise that this will change for the better, with some indication that it will get worse.

In many locations the majority of the homes, taken from families that were foreclosed on and booted to the street, are cash purchases, fueled by the $85 billion the government is giving banks every month, the same banks that reported a $20 billion profit in the 2nd quarter. They are being rented to people who make $14-$16/hr., which was slightly higher than the average wage of 70,000 of the jobs (in the fast-food and hospitality industries) created in our last jobs report.

If the homeless could start a bank...

[tclambert]

6. Sometimes the forces of the free market can't seem to get the ingredients together to make a pie.

Lots of people out of work. Lots of infrastructure in need of repair. Raw materials and tools ready but unused. Even plenty of money, trillions of dollars, sitting idle in the (mostly offshore) vaults of the rich. Some expect the free market to spontaneously combine available ingredients to solve all our problems. But we can see it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes we need a little political willpower to plug in the mixer.

[Hydra]

11. The Free Market is working great

For a select few at the top. They skipped all of those boring steps to create wealth and simply started helping themselves to the Treasury.

I wonder how long that will work out for?

[annabanana]

13. VERY well said. Should be an OP.

The "invisible hand" has always been a withered stalk.

[Blue Palasky]

7. what a cool country

[obxhead]

9. just wait until fannie/freddie have possession of all the foreclosures.

Then we'll see a jobs program tearing them down so we don't completely destroy the housing market. Hell, many of those homeless will probably be day laborers doing the work.

[1-Old-Man]

10. So, a guy without a home gets a job tearing down houses to earn enough to afford living accomodation

and as he tears down more and more houses the cost of those remaining goes up and up and so no matter how many houses it tears down he can never earn enough to find one of his own.

WTF?

[Hydra]

12. End stage Capitalism in a nutshell

People are paid(very little) to build their own prisons/coffins.

[geek tragedy]

14. Most of the homeless live where there aren't so many empty homes.

i.e. urban areas