Michael Fumento

A self-styled "homeless advocacy" group is the latest to exploit vets to achieve ends that would do nothing to help former service personnel. The National Alliance to End Homelessness released a "study" prompting great media fanfare making two points, both false. 1) Vets are greatly overrepresented among the homeless in shelters, and 2) the root cause of homelessness is inability to afford a home.

In fact, as I write in the New York Post, vets are only overrepresented because of sheer demographics. Shelter denizens are overwhelmingly male and males comprise 93 percent of all vets. As to housing, it bears noting that despite the efforts of myriad "advocacy" groups to present vets as losers, they have more education, higher rates of employment, and higher salaries than comparable non-vets. The data on why people are in shelters confirms what anybody (including me) who lives near a shelter already knows. These people aren't just like you and me but without a home; their rates of alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness are astronomical.

Claims such as these, and all the journalists who simply repeat them, do the homeless - vets or otherwise - a tremendous disservice in taking attention away from the real causes of their problems. Yeah, it's wicked. What's new?