Progressives are particularly adept at presenting proposals with lofty goals. And those proposals almost never work out as promised. To Progressives, good intentions are more important than good results. A recent article on CNN’s website illustrates this point.
The article notes that the nation has a severe shortage of housing for low-income families. This, the authors calculate, results in a cost to the nation’s economy of almost $200 billion per year. They then applaud Biden’s proposal to spend $300 billion to build or preserve two million affordable housing units.
If you think that this seems like a reasonable proposal, think again. A report issued by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, found that 20.4 million renter households paid 30 percent or more of their income for housing. Paying 30 percent or more of one’s income for housing is considered cost burdened, and such families are the intended beneficiaries of affordable housing schemes.
Biden’s proposal will help less than 10 percent of the cost burdened families. Which means, the government will spend $300 billion in order to save $20 billion. Only a small dent will be put in the housing shortage. But these meager results aren’t as important as the allegedly good intentions behind this plan.
Spending ridiculous amounts of money won’t solve the affordable housing problem, just as spending ridiculous amounts of money hasn’t solved the problem with government schools. A lack of money isn’t the cause of the failures of government schools, nor is it the cause of the shortage of affordable housing. The cause is a lack of freedom.
Restoring individual freedom is not a part of the Progressive agenda. Freedom provides a social context in which individuals can choose for themselves how to live their lives, and this conflicts with the goals of Progressives. Progressives want to make choices for us and to dictate how we live.
The fact that government control over individuals can only lead to misery and suffering doesn’t matter to Progressives. Their intentions, they want us to believe, are good. And that is all that matters.