So our great Alameda County Board of Supervisors, led by the intrepid Nikki Fortunato Bas, has agreed to divide $1.83 billion from Measure W, the 2020 Gouge-the-Taxpayers tax, into three “buckets,” the largest of which (85%) will go toward what they deem “the county’s long-term strategy to combating homelessness.”
Don’t you feel better now that you know the county has a strategy? That’s a lot of money for the county to divvy up among its importunate cities. Even so, Bas said that the county needs far more money than $1.83 billion “to make a meaningful dent in the crisis,” according to East Bay Insiders.
Exactly how much more she didn’t specify. But we know our Nikki: enough is never enough. There are always more parcel taxes to impose, more sales taxes, more public lands (such as the Coliseum) to sell off in dubious deals. Since homelessness is a black hole with an infinite capacity to suck up public funds, Nikki Bas has found herself a perpetual niche from which to tax, tax, tax, and scold, scold, scold the people.
And for what? For how many years has this homelessness scam been going on? How much money has the county, and the State of California, and the city of Oakland thrown at homeless “solutions”? There’s no way to reasonably calculate an answer. Let’s just say it’s been hundreds of millions, if not billions, in Oakland alone, and yet the city’s homeless count continues to rise every year. During the last biennial point-in-time count (2024), the official number of homeless people rose to an all-time high of 5,485, up nearly 20% over 2022’s total and 35% over 2019’s (the 2020 count was canceled due to the pandemic). Of 2024’s total, by the way, 52.5% of homeless were Black, whereas Blacks constitute just 21.8% of Alameda County’s population.
I think we’ve long known that the homelessness-political complex is a scourge upon the people. Left-wine politicians gain office promising to end homelessness (hello, Carroll Fife), and then they entrench themselves into office, weaving a hard cocoon of bureaucracy around themselves when they immediately begin running for re-election. The formula is simple: feed the parasites that feed off the taxpayers. The parasites in turn create their own little constituencies, and each little constituency builds its own hardcore shell around itself, until you have an interlocking web that absorbs insane amounts of money and accomplishes…nothing.
Name me one homeless program that has worked. Ever. Just one. But the point, you see, is precisely that they don’t work. And for that reason, the woke crowd argues that more money is needed. That this is throwing good money after bad never occurs to them or, perhaps, it does occur to them but they don’t give a damn. The point is to create permanent bureaucracies, funded by permanent taxes that will never be undone, until—bingo! We turn around and discover that we live in a socialist “democracy” that isn’t really a democracy at all because we, the people, have zero ability to prevent the woke politicians from robbing us blind.
By the way, the recent reports that just 63 OPD officers (out of about 700) live in Oakland is supposed to outrage us all and make us hate cops even more. Well, personally I don’t give a damn where my cops live. I just want them to show up for work, put their asses on the line every day to protect me and my home and the stores in Oakland that I shop at, and then let them go home to wherever they live, safe and sound of body, mind and spirit. If you’re one of these morons who complains that Oakland cops live in the ‘burbs, shut your trap. Next time you’re mugged, when the cops show up to help you, ask them where they live, and if they’re out-of-towners, tell them “No thanks, I don’t need help from foreigners,” and get your ass whupped again.
Steve Heimoff