Show HUD’s Budget Cuts the Door

Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, set the stage for President Scrooge’s meanspirited budget when he suggested that the government had made things too “cozy” for poor people and said that poverty was merely a “state of mind.” Mr. Carson, ostensibly the custodian of housing for the nation’s poor, left the impression that the five million people who rely on the government for rental assistance could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps or suffer the consequences.

The people who rely on federal rental assistance are society’s most vulnerable. Two-thirds of them are quite poor, with incomes that do not exceed even 30 percent of median income for their area. Nine-tenths of them are senior citizens, people with disabilities, veterans and working poor people with children who would eventually end up in homeless shelters or on the streets without federal help.