Economic Dissonance

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Today’s weekly includes:

🪨How Washington State bought nearly a $1 million dollars in boulders… to combat homelessness?

💸The dissonance between how the economy is performing, and how people actually view it.

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In Brief: Washington State Buys Boulders to… Combat Homelessness?

The Pacific Northwest has a nationwide reputation for being one of the epicenters of our country’s housing insecurity crisis. Many state residents of Washington are privy to seeing large homeless encampments up and down the I-5 corridor.

But Washington State residents will have a new view along stretches of this highway that once were the site of these encampments.

Boulders. $700,000 worth of taxpayer funded boulders.

These boulders were purchased by the state, not to build some rudimentary stone structures to house these people, but to deter them from creating encampments along the highway in the first place.

Here is a picture for context:

I find these boulders to be quite symbolic of my state and country’s inability to effectively identify the root causes of the homeless crisis, or do anything of any real, substantive value with our taxes to combat this pressing issue.

My question is: why stop at boulders? Why not just pile $700,000 in cash in these areas and set it on fire? Or start storing decaying nuclear material along the highways instead?

Here is a telling quote in a story from The Olympian on this topic. Reporter Shauna Sowersby interviewed Kris Abrudan, communications director for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).

Abrudan had this to say:

“[WSDOT] gives a lot of thought to our use of more expensive encampment deterrent tools like boulders.”

A lot of thought, eh?

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Solving the homeless crisis is ridiculously complex, I am not pretending its not. The reasons people deal with housing insecurity are vast, ranging from mental illness and addiction, to economic reasons, to domestic violence etc.

But laws deterring homelessness, or vain attempts at creating anti-homeless architecture (like piling boulders…) is the ultimate head-in-sand approach to the problem.

These boulders, and the wasted tax dollars used to purchase them, are just the most recent reminder that no one in our government has any clue how to solve this problem, but they definitely know how to just keep pushing the homeless population around. One boulder at a time.

Economic Dissonance

The Biden Administration recently expressed frustration with how the mainstream media is covering the White House’s economic policy successes.

Biden has a point too. By all the typical counting metrics, the economy looks very strong:

• The Dow Jones hit an all-time high in December.

• Inflation, which hit over 8% in 2022, has dropped all the way down to 3%, which the White House can directly point to the landmark Inflation Reduction Act as having an impact on.

• Domestic oil production has hit record levels, meaning America is becoming more energy independent than ever before.

• Unemployment has remained at a healthy level of around ~3%.

• 14 million jobs have been created under Biden.

Yet despite all these exceptional on-paper numbers, over 80% of Americans view todays economy as being poor.