I walked along the Willamette River this afternoon and saw half a dozen young people camped out in sleeping bags amidst freezing rain. Last year, 549,928 Americans experienced homelessness. Almost a quarter of those were children. Among the ways that the federal government combats homelessness is through issuing housing vouchers. 5.3 million people make use of these annually to afford decent housing, at a cost of $19 billion to the government in 2016. Until Reagan drastically cut federal funding for affordable housing, there was no homelessness crisis in America. There was widespread poverty, but for the most part, people hadn’t been living on the streets en masse since the Great Depression. Since Reagan, we have failed in many ways to provide basic shelter for our fellow citizens. The current President and Congress propose to cut housing vouchers further by about 1 billion dollars at the same time that they have rammed through a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut, most of which benefits corporations and the very wealthy. The entire federal housing subsidy budget amounts to a little more than 1 percent of that tax cut. Folks, if we can give a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut to corporations, we can end homelessness. What do you say we get on that by voting in droves in 2018, and again in 2020?