The Drudge Report has a link to a very politically incorrect headline which caught my attention: “Charity homes built by Jimmy Carter start to crumble”. As in everything that Carter has done, he means well but it somehow is always the wrong thing to do in the long run. (Remember that this is the same man who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the Middle East – and see how well that has turned out?!) And it now appears that his Habitat for Humanity may be heading for disaster, too.
Carter and a contingency of volunteers built an entire community of homes in northern Florida eight years ago. Today there is a lawsuit representing many of the 85 homeowners who are now claiming that their homes were built on a rubbish dump. The Timesonline article goes on to say “One man pulled up his floorboards to find rubbish 5ft deep under his kitchen. Other complaints include cracking walls and rotting door frames that let in rats and ants. Many residents have complained of mildew and mysterious skin rashes”.It shouldn’t really be a big surprise that there are problems with these homes, considering how quickly they were built. Added to this is the, lets say, “inexperience” of the new homeowners. So it is almost to be expected that between the hasty constructions of the homes within a few days then followed by years of less than optimum care that these homes are in disrepair. The same problems are also occurring with the homes built for that TV show, Extreme Makeover. Plus I wouldn’t be surprised if half the folks after the first year can’t even afford to pay the taxes on their expensive new homes, much less the utilities and other monthly bills.
But no one ever hears what happens to these homes and homeowners after the cameras are turned off and the celebrities leave. As I said in the beginning, criticizing Jimmy Carter or even Ty Pennington from Extreme Makeover is one of the biggest politically incorrect statements you could make. The liberals love this kind of charity for it shows that they are helping the little people and it makes them feel good about themselves. They just don’t seem to understand that it would be kinder in the long run to pay for people to go to college or a trade school so that they can eventually afford to buy their own houses, or at the very least to spend time teaching them how to care for their families and new homes.
So now it seems as if some of the houses are falling down partly due to shoddy quick work combined with the fact that some of these new homeowners neglect the upkeep of their homes. Yet no one ever does a follow up to point this out. I guess that would be too much reality for the liberals in New York and LA who live in their insulated world.
Unfortunately I think we are in for a lot more of this kind of thinking. It is a lot easier to shove money at a problem then it is to figure out the cause of the problem and fix that. Democrat governors are requesting $1 trillion in bailout money to cover state shortfalls. Congress has
already handed out a $700 billion bank bailout. And now Obama is pushing a massive new $700+ billion “stimulus package”.Where is all this money going to come from? And how exactly will it be spent? Once again, nobody really knows. In a way the story of these Habitat for Humanity homes is a reflection of what is happening throughout our government. Washington and Hollywood stand hand in hand and make a lot of noise about helping the “little people”. So they will take billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money to build shaky structures, which only help a chosen few, and then eventually it all falls apart through neglect, greed and ill usage while they somehow end up making millions from it. Sound about right? And with the incoming Congress it will only get worse. But don’t get me started on that….
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