98 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two constituency for place based financial statements. Return on investments to special interest was directly contradictory to return on investment to taxpayers. [I ex- plained that we were making a software tool that would allow individuals to see and manipulate government financial data within their county or Congressional district called Community Wizard.] He said that Wizard was a stupid idea, that would not work. Things were hopeless, he said. I showed Luis a printout of the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports for his community of Bronxville, New York. When he saw the figures, he exploded in rage. The first item was $4 million of flood insurance. This was the worst form of corruption, Luis said. Apparently, Bronxville was on a hill. The next day Luis spent two hours on the phone with the Deputy Mayor of Bronxville going through each item and informing him this was all going to stop. Apparently, things were far from hopeless, once one had the information. It just took one good map to see how to fix thousands of little things, one at a time. Catherine Austin Fitts, “The Myth of the Rule of Law” HUD has a program called Hope VI, which is the construction of new public housing. Here is how the money works on Hope VI. We tax people who make $36,000 a year. We then take the money and use it to build housing that costs $150 -250,000 (inclusive of all overhead, etc.) per apartment unit, which we use to warehouse people who make $10,000 a year or less in a manner in which they are unlikely to become taxpayers. This generates a large number of jobs, profit, and private equity for a group of lawyers, accountants, developers, consultants and others who tend to make substantially in excess of $36,000, say anywhere from $75,000 to $500,000 or more a year. In the HUD programs, a surpris- ing number of them went to Harvard, Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and last but most special, Harvard Law School. If not Harvard, someplace more like it than the University of Tennessee agricultural school. A few years back I took the pricings on the HUD defaulted mortgage portfolio to the [assistant to the] head of Hope VI. I explained that HUD had substantial single-family inventory in those same communities. Empty single-family homes could be bought and repaired at a fraction of the price of new construction of public housing by private developers. The HUD official said, “but then how would we generate fees for our friends?” You just have to love a woman who is that honest. The result of this situation is summed up by this statistic: twenty or thirty years ago, 70 cents of every dollar of federal spending went into the pocket of someone in the neighborhood it was targeted at. Today that number is less than 30 cents. What that means is that investment in community development has enjoyed about a 300 – 400% increase in overhead, at the same time that technology has actually made it possible for overhead to drop dramatically The public policy solu- tion has been to outsource government functions to make them more productive. In fact, this jump in overhead is simply a subsidy provided to private companies and organizations that receive hereby a guaranteed return regardless of perfor- mance. We have subsidies and financing to support housing programs that make