Congressional candidate Rhue Reis says 200,000 to 400,000 military veterans are homeless…(GRRRRR!!!)
By C. Eugene Emery Jr.
Politifact.com
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014
During a recent broadcast of “State of the State,” a Rhode Island public access TV show, the subject of homeless veterans came up, in a round about sort of way.
The show, which aired Sept. 7, 2014, featured a debate between U.S. Rep. James Langevin, a Democrat, and Rhue Reis, the Republican who would like to replace him. The two were talking about what to do about the children coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Reis said they should be sent back to their respective countries because the United States has too many problems of its own.
“It needs to stop for their safety and because we cannot handle the influx. We have a much more difficult time taking care of our own,” he said. “When you have 200,000 to 400,000 military veterans on the street in this country on any given day, we can’t take care of them and yet we want to bring in another influx of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, illegal immigrants? We can’t even take care of our own.”
We wondered whether Reis was correct about the number of homeless veterans.
When we asked him for his source, Reis referred us to a web page from the National Coalition for the Homeless, which featured a fact sheet written in 2009. It pegs the count at 130,000 to 200,000 per night — substantially less than Reis’s 200,000 to 400,000 number.
The Rest…HERE
