Noni Mausa on Public Assistance and Who Gets Rent Subsidies?

Noni Mausa sends this from today’s New York Times:

After spending a year and a half in a homeless shelter with his wife and two young daughters, Mr. Guzman is living in a railroad flat at the edge of Bushwick, just across the subway tracks from a cemetery. The city is paying most of the family’s $1,170 monthly rent this year…Mr. Guzman … makes only $7.15 an hour …

She adds…

A few scribbles on the back of an envelope tell me that $7.15 / hour full time, pays $14,872 before taxes. The annual rent for the substandard home in the article is $14,040.

A question for the list — how is this rent subsidy, presented as a benefit to the working poor, actually not a huge subsidy to business?

And before you go for the red herring — yes, I know in the article Mr. Guzman works at the shelter where he and his family lived for 18 months, but plenty of other working poor in NYC work for similar wages.

Cactus here… Its only semi-related, but Noni’s post made me think about it and I’d like to add this as a comment. One of the arguments folks on the right make against a corporate income tax is that they tell us the tax ends up being passed onto the workers of the corporation. If that’s the case… given that a subsidy is just a negative tax, if many of a company’s workers make a low enough wage to qualify for assistance from the government, would most people on the right suggest the best way to help those workers is to cut off all their assistance completely and give a lump sump to the company?