A Trillion Dollars for Making Wars—But the People Want Housing; Libertarians Say U.S. Renters Get Raw Deal; Tenant-Advocate Students Get Shout Out
Three Big Things
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on December 19, 2025.
A Trillion Dollars for Making Wars—But the People Want Housing, Groceries, Healthcare
Stephen Semler continues his peerless reporting on the United States’ insane military spending with a new article on Congress passing the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Add the $901 billion in the legislation passed last week to the $156 billion in the Big Beautiful Bill, and we are set to spend over $1 trillion on military spending last year.
As we wrote in an October post that also highlighted Semler’s work, just one-eighth of our military budget could ensure every child and adult in the United States is safely housed.
Guess who understands that? The American people. Semler points out that only one in every ten voters wanted our military budget to increase.
Meanwhile, Politico polling shows that Americans are struggling to afford groceries, housing, healthcare, and utility bills. When people were asked about their priorities for their government, tanks, missiles, and killer drones were not on the list.
Which is a problem for Donald Trump and Republicans, because further polling shows that many of Trump’s own 2024 voters are blaming him for the struggle to afford necessities.
Chart: 2021 Military Spending, via Wikimedia Commons
Libertarians Say U.S. Renters Are Getting a Raw Deal
Thank you to a colleague (and HHR Newsletter reader) for sending on an article by Andrew Heaton from the libertarian publication Reason . The article echoes a theme we lifted up back in January, 2023: the U.S. lavishes subsidies on homeowners—especially the wealthy ones—while leaving renters out in the cold.
We have in the past highlighted the opinions of homeownership subsidy skeptics like Jerusalem Desmas and Prof. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. But Heaton’s article is unique in that he analyzes the homeownership subsidy question through a libertarian perspective. Specifically, he criticizes the U.S. focus on homeownership as a wealth-building tool. “We can’t have cheap, abundant housing and also rely on home equity as the main driver of middle-class wealth,” Heaton writes.
Heaton highlights the huge amount of government dollars going to homeowners, with no parallel support for renters:
“Our tax structure continues to encourage homeownership as a national investment strategy. You can deduct the interest on up to $750,000 of mortgage debt from your federal taxes. And you can deduct much of your local and state property taxes from your federal income taxes . . .
Add it all up, and Washington subsidizes homeownership to the tune of around $150 billion per year.
On top of all that, when you sell your subsidized home, the first $250,000 of profit—or $500,000 if you’re married—is exempt from capital gains taxes . . .
Renters get none of these benefits. No subsidies on the way in, no exemptions on the way out.”
Tenant-Advocate Students Get Shout Out
Many HHR Newsletter readers know that my day-job is teaching a law school clinic. Our students take on their first clients, usually people facing eviction and/or dealing with unsafe, unhealthy rental housing conditions.
So it was a thrill to see those students featured in an Indiana University article about their work. The students spoke about fighting for clients who are facing illegal evictions, struggling for accommodations for their disabilities, and trying to stave off homelessness.
The article also described the research and policy advocacy that students and their supervisors like Prof. Megan Stuart do. All of it fights back against what one of the students rightly told the reporter was “huge injustice to Indiana residents.”
You can check out the article, IU McKinney Students Advocate for Hoosiers Facing Housing Instability, by clicking on the link.
Signed,
A Proud Clinic Teacher
