Another Scam of America’s Taxpayers
The October 2006 issue of Wastewatcher from Citizens Against Government Waste discusses a flaw in the $3.7 billion federal Community Development Block Grant program. CDBG is a 1960’s Great Society program designed to help the poor, but has become just another way government has of redistributing the income of American taxpayers.
According to CAGW, “The Census Bureau counts low-income (less than $9,800 per year) students who do not live in dormitories as below the poverty line even if their parents pay 100 percent of their bills.” Consequently, “(c)ollege towns such as Columbus, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Berkeley, California are counted as ‘poor’ . . . simply by the presence of cash-strapped college kids.” The result, says CAGW, is that the “wildly erroneous methodology helps relatively prosperous towns compete with impoverished inner cities and rural areas.”
CAGW notes that “HUD has sought to exclude the majority of off-campus students from poverty counts, but it falls to Congress to change the law that governs grant formulas. This is not an example of "mindless bureaucrats" but of mindless members of Congress failing to perform their oversight responsibilities.” Unfortunately, the inflated poverty data is not the only thing wrong with the CDBG program, either.