An affordable housing bill was introduced today that addresses two pressing public crises: climate-changing emissions and geographic / demographic economic devastation.
The legislation could reduce public housing costs by $97 million per year and cut energy costs by $613 million. It would also impose labor and "Buy America" requirements for construction. The move would potentially create nearly 250,000 union jobs each year in the U.S. and cut carbon emissions on the scale of taking 1.2 million cars off the road over a 10-year period. It’s called the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced the bill and say it would improve living conditions for nearly 2 million people. Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored it. its possible the house passes it. And it is expected that republicans will try to kill the bill because they can’t be seen as doing something bipartisan for normal working people because that would compromise the myth campaign they’ve created about anyone to the “left”. Excellent article on this self defeating strategy in Politico if you’d like to read more about that here: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/republican-party-obstructionism-victory-trump-214498 The proposal calls for a modest investment of $18 billion per year for 10 years to sustainably retrofit and repair public housing with the goal of eliminating all carbon emissions. Two initiatives in which we can’t afford to under invest. As a cost comparison we spend 81 billion per year on prisons conservatively speaking. And 100 billion per year on corporate subsidies according to the Cato institute. Here’s the link to that study: https://www.cato.org/cato-handbook-policymakers/cato-handbook-policy-makers-8th-edition-2017/special-interest-spending Severely impoverished communities are in aggregate scientifically the result of historical bad and often intentional public policy which have concentrated wealth in the hands of oligarchs who now control billions of the nations wealth. Walmart alone makes 6B per year in reported profits. And there are a few hundred tyrannically sized mega-corporations that report roughly the same level of annual profits. Easily a trillion dollars is available in reported corporate profits alone. So three years of corporate profits could to completely eradicate global poverty financing economist Jeffrey Sachs’ well referenced 20 year plan. The polyarchy or the Republic or aristocratic class have spent decades running a PR campaign indicating otherwise. They pretend national resources are a lot less than they are and blame small impoverished populations for being lazy, take precious tax dollars etc. Of course it’s the polar opposite. But a civilized society - especially the richest country on the planet - is in a position to invest in its citizens and improve the quality of life and human recourses for the county and planet. This is a relatively cheap and good bill and a good direction for meeting the needs of human beings. And is a of course a critical step in addressing the imminent national and global security issue of the global warming crisis and the economic disaster of inequality.
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