I’ve got good news and bad news about homelessness in America.

The good news is that that the number of Americans living on the streets went up only 2.7 percent in 2019. The bad news is that homelessness would have dropped if California wasn’t part of the United States.

Homelessness in California shot up 16.7 percent in one year. That’s nearly 22,000 more people living without shelter in the Golden State than there were last year. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson says the national number would have dropped if not for California.

This isn’t a scandal. It’s not a tragedy. It’s insanely stupid.

If the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, the liberal Democratic California politicians who run the state are loony tunes.

NBC News:

The nation’s most populous state experienced a 16.4 percent increase in homelessness in 2019, the report by the Department of Housing and Urban Development said, even though voters approved a $4 billion affordable housing bond more than a year ago, and Los Angeles passed its own $1.2 billion housing bond in 2016. L.A. has been slow to spend its money on shelters because of neighborhood opposition, and the state’s largest coastal cities have long experienced housing prices and rents that exceed the budgets of many families. In November, San Francisco voters approved $600 million in bonds for affordable housing.

Like broken robots, California liberals continue to throw money at the problem. Year after year, they blame the rich, the landlords, capitalism — anything and everybody but themselves. Truly, remarkably insane.

“As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we’re also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast where the cost of housing is extremely high,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency.”

Note to Carson: They ARE addressing the problem with “crisis-like urgency” and have been for years. It’s just that they are totally bereft of any ideas beyond appropriating taxpayer money to shovel toward local governments and make them come up with solutions.

All that cash makes the good little liberals in California feel good about themselves, too. “We’re doing something about the problem,” they boast as homeless people take up residence in their neighborhoods and use their streets and sidewalks as public toilets.

California should be made a ward of the federal government. People are suffering and dying in the streets, but at least the liberals are treating them with “respect” and “dignity.” I don’t know how dignified you can be while squatting in the middle of the street and taking a crap. I’ve never tried it.

Just recently, the New York Times had a long thumb-sucker of an article on an Oakland homeless encampment and compared living conditions there with conditions in one of the worst slums in Mexico City. Guess which one was worse?