As homelessness explodes in America's blue cities, something's getting harder to harder to hide now: the curious rise of homelessness spending, which, counter-intuitively, seems to be making the homelessness problem worse.

Homelessness in the city of Los Angeles has increased an estimated 16% since 2018, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), an agency that oversees government funds for homeless services in Los Angeles County.

LAHSA also reported an estimated 12% increase in homelessness since last year in Los Angeles County.

In a place as big as Los Angeles, that's tens of thousands of people, as the article notes. Here's the thing, though:

The uptick comes two years into a local 10-year initiative to aid people in need, which includes investments of about $355 million annually, along with a $1.2 billion investment by the city, to build thousands of supportive housing units over the course of the next decade.

That's weird stuff, given that the money is being shelled out supposedly to halt homelessness. That's some mission they've got there, now that the homeless population has expanded.

Instead of admitting they're doing something wrong, the leftists running Los Angeles vaguely explain what's happening this way:

The LAHSA blamed "economic forces" that have outpaced the growth in resources for people who are experiencing homelessness in a statementreleased on Tuesday. "Our ability to reach, serve, and house people experiencing homelessness has risen enormously since voters made unprecedented investments in our homeless services system in 2016 and 2017," said Peter Lynn, executive director of LAHSA.

That's pathetic stuff, given the lavishness with which they've been showered taxpayer money, supposedly to improve a situation. They aren't improving it. If they were a football team or a military and produced this result, they'd be fired, because all they've produced is failure.

This calls to mind what all these panacea government programs really are about — not helping the homeless, as it happens. Just hiring bureaucrats, supposedly to "service" the homeless. Bureaucratic hiring sprees require large numbers of constituents. That entices the creation and manufacture of more homeless people, however real, to stand in line to be serviced by those bureaucrats, otherwise there is no justification for their existence.

Los Angeles could have done a heck of a lot better for the homeless, were they serious about this, by handing out $100,000 checks to all 35,000 homeless the bureaucrats have been hired to "service."

That's never going to happen, because homeless help is never about results. In fact, the money pegged to help is actually all about expanding the size of government, something Los Angeles has done in spades as it browbeats citizens into Paying More. As economist Thomas Sowell has put it, you can have all the poverty you want to pay for.

Los Angeles is paying for a lot. And with the economic dynamic for bureaucrats so good, you can bet the call for funding is only going to grow even as the results get worse and worse. As they say about insanity...you can bet they'll be doing this over and over and expecting a different result.

Image credit: Theodore Hayes via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.