To the blue-state satraps running homeless haven California, it was all supposed to be so easy. Shake the feds down for millions in the name of ending homelessness, or else yell loudly to the gullible media about the heartless Trump administration denying them funds. And once the funds rolled in, party hearty and fatten the bureaucracy.

They tried it one time too many, and this time, they got the mother of all smack-downs:

In a return letter signed by [Housing and Urban Development] Secretary [Ben] Carson, the Administration responded by pointing out that California "seeks federal dollars…from hardworking American taxpayers but fails to admit that your State and local policies have played a major role in the current crisis." Carson lists some of the state-based causes as being an "over-regulated housing market, its inefficient allocation of resources, and its policies that have weakened law enforcement." Experts who spoke to ABC agree that "state and local policies...have led to the affordable housing shortage in California," while also admitting that simply spending more money "could take decades...to impact homelessness." The dispute comes as President Trump has also threatened to hit California with environmental violations due to the pollution caused by the high rate of homelessness.

In other words, they wanted the feds to pay for the poverty they themselves created, and instead of getting it, they got called out. It recalls Thomas Sowell's old warning that you can have all the poverty you want to pay for, except in this case, they wanted other people to pay.

The details of the letter, explaining exactly the blue-state policies that are causing the problem and laying it at the feet of the state's leftist rulers, are frankly pretty amazing. Here's a screenshot of a couple of PDF files, with pink emphasis mine:

Carson laid it right out, citing that his letter was coming straight from President Trump: they've trashed the housing market for affordable housing through their greenie regulations, which incidentally drive the cost of housing vouchers sky-high, meaning fewer served even as the homeless population soars well above the national average. Worse still, they've shiftlessly failed to spend the veteran vouchers they have. They're still sitting there as illegals get coddled under California's first-in-line policies and homeless veterans get ignored.

They've undercut the cops in their cop-demonization policies and prevented cops from hauling mendicants off to places of actual housing, including those with mental illness problems. Worse still, they have emptied out their mental institutions, dumping the patients on the streets, where they become homeless. They've done little about drug addiction, which is a major driver of homelessness — their decriminalization policies have been a bonanza for drug-dealers and human-trafficking cartels bringing in illegals.

And speaking of illegals, their vast welcome mat of bennies offered to illegal aliens has made a massive number of them want to come to their state, chasing legal residents out, and taking up housing stock that could help the homeless.

Not a pretty picture, but persuasively and specifically argued. This isn't a case of political vindictiveness or payback from the Trump administration, but a tried and true, strongly supported intellectual and experiential argument that they can't argue with. They think it's just easy to yell for more funds no matter what they do.

Well, not anymore. The excellence of these arguments is worthy of the Wall Street Journal's or New York Post's or Issues & Insights's editorial pages. Someone laid it out for them instead of just telling them to go to heck. That makes it much harder for these blue-state panjandrums to carry on business as usual, expecting more money and just making the problems worse because of it.

Someone told them no. Someone gave these socialist drunks the intervention they needed.

Thanks, Ben Carson. Thanks, President Trump.