By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com, [email protected]

The night after Christmas, New York City was teaming with people, actually queuing up on the street for a turn to enter stores, jamming holiday markets, cafes, enjoying Christmas decorations. But they had to walk past people camped out on the street in freezing temperature.

The New York Times just reported that the number of people experiencing homelessness topped 770,000, an increase of more than 18 percent over last year and the highest on record. The causes include the end of COVID protections against eviction and aid programs, the abusive mishandling of migrants by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, literally trafficking and dumping people in cities led by Democrats, the obstruction of Republicans to pass border security and immigration reform so that these people making a legal claim for asylum cannot be processed in a timely way, and on top of that, the high cost of housing and lack of affordable housing.

Kamala Harris’campaign offered ways to address the problem, targeting housing affordability in an Opportunity Economy agenda, aimed at an economy, and a society, in which people “thrive, not merely survive.”

Instead, a slight majority of voters chose faux-populist dictator-wannabe Trump, richest-man-in-the-world Elon Musk and the Project 2025 approach: slashing the social safety net altogether to shave $2 trillion from federal spending (one-third of the budget), which means Head Start, food stamps, Medicaid, public health, public education, Pell grants, Medicare and Social Security. (So-called “discretionary spending” totals $1.7 trillion.)

“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity” for him and the other billionaires.

Here’s what that looked like in New York City on the Night after Christmas:

See:

A Dickens of a Christmas

Migrants and End of Covid Restrictions Fuel Jump in U.S. Homelessness

Elon Musk asks voters to brace for economic ‘hardship,’ deep spending cuts in potential Trump Cabinet role

__________________________              

© 2024 News & Photo Features Syndicate, a division of Workstyles, Inc. All rights reserved. For editorial feature and photo information, go to www.news-photos-features.com, email [email protected]. Blogging at www.dailykos.com/blogs/NewsPhotosFeatures. ‘Like’ us at facebook.com/NewsPhotoFeatures, Tweet @KarenBRubin Threads: @news_and_photo_features