Alternatively the government can spend an equal or greater amount to making homelessness illegal, making their lives as painful as possible, reducing every opportunity they have for upward mobility, and simultaneously reducing taxes for the capitalists.
In the US the cruelty is the point. We will never end homelessness here because its an intended feature of our economic system. It’s a constant threat to workers. Coercing them into accepting low wages and long hours in the name of stability.
It should be treated as a union issue.
“You don’t get to have the leverage of excommunication and death over our workers”
They key is they did it nationwide. If one area in the US tries to do this, other areas will ship them their homeless.
If you recover 4/5 from them, then your economy is going to boom
If you recover 4/5 from them, then your economy is going to boom
It has to function long enough and well enough for that recovery, and the sheer malice of conservatives in this country suggests that the city would be swiftly overrun with confused bussed-in folk on the taxpayer dime while GOP governors crow about how they’ve defeated the Woke Menace™ yet again
This a huge thing to overcome. Our structure is made for these sorts of decisions and assistance to be locally organized, funded and regulated. Changing that to a federal level is an undertaking and a half. Even if it was to pass. Which it wouldn’t because of all of the above.
Conservatives hate these not because they don’t work, but that they shouldn’t work. They insist that the only thing that matters is piety and hard work. If those aren’t enough, you just aren’t pious enough and aren’t working hard enough, even if the work literally crippled you that you cannot do as much of it as you did before.
It is entirely about being cruel and evil as a policy.
“Without the threat of being thrown out onto the street, my workers won’t put up with as much mistreatment.”
If you have kids and aren’t rich, you literally can’t go into business for yourself in the US…if you fail that means your family becomes homeless and loses their health care.
The cruelty and evil helps the rich control the rest of us.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a – rather long winded – story, co-authored by Mark Twain, about a family who inherits something like 80,000 acres of [worthless] land in east Tennessee. They spend years trying to scheme their way to wealth by selling the land, only to completely fail and ultimately lose it due to unpaid property taxes. The story is satire but it’s a sad one.
It’s about poor people who imagine themselves to be rich people in waiting. If not for this one pesky little obstacle, which actually turns out to be a lifetime full of obstacles. Because the easist way to get rich is to be rich and the hardest way to get rich is to not be rich.
On some level, this is how the average Republican sees themselves: a rich person in waiting. And they would finally get there if not for all those OTHER poor people who keep “stealing” all the “wealth”.
And enriching the bourgeoisies!
Just execute the homeless, grind them into feed for the poor and the problem solves itself.
Holy shit, it’s not that hard.
A modest proposal really, Swift would be proud.
Also I don’t quite get it. Who makes the money?
Oh is this so they can work?
Do they have to sign a contract where they will work for you or else they lose the house and counseling?
I just don’t see how a society can continue if they aren’t paying their fair share!
/SarcasticCapitalism
Had me in the first half. My thumbs were really revving up.
The worst thing is, this is a far more effective way to make them productive members of society. It just isn’t cruel.
If it’s not cruel, I’m not doing it!
As a conservative I support this idea, because it has no means testing.
Means testing is fucked up in two ways:
- It makes government larger and gets the government asking questions, poking its nose into everything
- It creates a perverse incentive structure, one which doesn’t match nature and hence doesn’t match the way our brains evolved to respond to challenge.
The perverse incentive structure is the worse of the two, in my opinion. Just like crack cocaine hacks the brain, presents something the brain can’t handle because it didn’t evolve for, rewarding a person with resources only when they don’t succeed basically programs a person to fail.
I’m all for the government generously giving with an open hand to people, and letting the people decide when to start receiving benefits and when to stop. People are either worth it or they aren’t, and a person doesn’t stop being worth it just because they got their shit together, or start being worth it just because they failed.
Government should treat everyone the same. If a government wants to present a service like “free housing if you want it”, I’m totally fine with that.
As a conservative
I’m all for the government generously giving with an open hand to people
“Conservative” is not exactly a rigidly-defined term, but here in the US these two lines I quoted from your comment are absolutely polar opposites.
Edit: I should probably start by saying that this is somewhat off-topic.
In the Netherlands we tend to rank our parties along left-right and progressive-conservative axes separately. Conservative-left gets you Christians who care about the poor. In other countries there’s also the “I want the government to support our workers”, “I want to go back to Soviet times” and “I’m leftist but LGBTQ is wrong” types.
It’s an interesting difference. By supporting aid to the poor, you are trying to conserve that which already exists in your country. By supporting aid to the poor, we are trying to progress beyond what already exists in our country. Same issue, same viewpoint, but because your country is so much more advanced than us already on this issue, it makes you a conservative and me a progressive.
Oh I’d never call myself a conservative, and most conservative parties here are right-wing as well.
It’s a fiscally conservative position, where fiscally conservative is defined by someone who wants the government to spend less money and have a balanced budget.
Homeless people are a net burden on the government, even if the only costs are to arrest and imprison them. Since we are already paying to house them (in prison) it would make sense instead to give them a modest place to stay and enough support to get them back to a healthy state of living. This becomes a net financial benefit because a healthy employed person pays income tax, they buy stuff and pay sales tax, etc. so the money spent to get them back on their feet is repaid and then some.
The same thing happens again when the government offers free college or vocational training to people, the amount of taxes someone pays goes up with their income, and using the government as a single-payer to these schools will help keep costs low.
Case in point: in Ontario we had a program called Second Career (it still lives on as ‘Better Jobs Ontario’ but it’s been hamstrung by the conservative government) which was funded through EI and would pay your tuition, books, supplies, and give a basic living allowance up to $28k per year if you qualify. It would cover any 2-year diploma program, with the caveat that if you failed out you would be on the hook to repay the tuition/books/supplies costs.
I did that program starting in 2009 and paid out-of-pocket (w/OSAP) for a third year to upgrade from Technician to Technologist. Prior to that, our household income was low enough that we effectively paid 0 income tax after deductions. After graduating, I tripled my income, and in the 11 or so years since I’ve doubled it again. For the ~$60k the government spent on me, they made that back in about the first 3 years after graduation and the rest has been profit from their perspective.
It’s a fiscally conservative position, where fiscally conservative is defined by someone who wants the government to spend less money and have a balanced budget.
Just to continue my point: “fiscal conservatism” has had nothing whatsoever to do with US conservatism since Ronald “Deficits Don’t Matter” Reagan blew the budget to pieces in the 1980s and started us on our debt spiral that currently has us sitting at $35 fucking trillion.
in Ontario we
Ah.
I believe in limited government. Removing means testing from government services reduces the size of government.
You shouldn’t have to work for a roof over your head and mental health support.
A conservative with compassion and sense is always a welcome sight. This is a pretty obvious solution imo, but the powers that be seem to disagree.
I’m for restricting human behavior as little as possible while still allowing anyone to escape any bad situation they don’t want to be apart of.
Bingo
Who knew getting them healthy and back in the workforce paying taxes could pay off?
This here exactly should be the goal of all those “fiscally responsible” Republicans: homeless sick dude is healed and housed and counseled until he’s back paying his damned taxes and a productive member of society again.
People who can’t cope will need a different programme, but still a live-in deal with counseling and a focus on the fundamental needs.
Homeless people cost more money than these programs do, even if you don’t take into account the amount of taxes being paid back.
So do prisons. It’s all performative nonsense from a financial perspective.
Prisons are a way to use taxes to transfer wealth from the lower classes to the upper.
“Party of fiscal responsibility” is projection, just like everything else.
It just depends on whose finances they feel responsible for. If it’s wealthy people then yes they are fiscally responsible to make sure they get more tax breaks.
I’ve seen nothing more demonic than prosperity gospel.
Canonically, if Jesus saw a megachurch, he would start making a whip.
Would be funny if it wasn’t so sad and aggravating.
Ok, but how can Finland afford the nesting-doll yachts if they are giving out money that should have gone into billionaires’ hoards?
I can imagine nothing more miserable than having a day out on a massive expensive yacht… on the Baltic Sea.
(Regular rich people might have some fun on the ferries, but billionaires probably don’t, because this involves buying a ticket and sharing the ship with the rabble.)
One day, I wish I had a shitty old fishing boat and go slowly puttering through the rain and gloom. Living the real life.
It still blows my mind that some people cannot comprehend that not everything needs an exchange of currency in some way shape or form.
“They don’t do anything in return?” “They don’t get worse!” “But who compensates the people who help them?” “We do.” “But then who compensates us?”
I view it as a form of capitalism indoctrination. If there’s no material compensation it’s a bad idea, which is the capitalist idea of “if I don’t make a profit I won’t do it”. I’ve seen people argue free energy is bad because the excess energy cannot be monetized, which is something you say only if you want to profit from energy.
Like do these people realize that if we give people the means to not just survive, but thrive, in our society which rapidly approaches post-scarcity (I’d argue we’d basically be there if we had better distribution of wealth) then they would have no reason to steal or kill? I mean except for the worst cases, but ya know… if everyone except for the truly evil has no reason or desire to do crime then…
Just saying imagine a world where police actually fought bad guys and just let social workers handled the wayward sheep, the downtrodden, and the desperate?
i got drunk and forgot why this pissed me off, but gardening is awesome
Yes, but if we don’t have so many shitheads in the street how can we justify such bloated police budgets? I would rather spend the money on our fine boys and girls in blue then some people who actually need it.
Okay, but we have to be careful what part of the budget the money goes to. If we pay the cops too much, they might send their kids to college or some other liberal bullshit; and if we pay too much for training, we might accidentally get them competent instructors instead of grifters who promise them that killing people will make their pp hard. We have to make sure that we only buy military surplus that no police force could conceivably need, and paint it scawwy black, because military camo isn’t oppressive enough.
/s
We don’t need more cops. We - America especially - seem to need better cops.
But the job can’t lure so many people in that it has a rich candidate list, and what we see here is that cops make shit salary for the terms of the work and necessary oversight. So they can’t be arsed for a pittance when people who can do my job sit in comfy Aerons all day and bang on a kayboard for great victory (and no bullets) for even more cash.
But, better job descs needs more money, and here we are beefing cop budgets to get fewer, better cops. You can’t win by cheaping out.
For a job with little in the way of qualifications, it does not pay poorly, majority of states are above the national average of $28.50 an hour. Not surprisingly wages in south are some of the worst, but in line for that region in general. There is little meaningful oversight, they have immunity and often very strong unions.
Being a cop pays pretty well, especially when you consider the low experience and educational requirements.
The “4 out of 5” figure roughly matches what I recall being told by a head of Catholic Charities maybe a decade ago. You certainly have some percentage of people who’ve been given everything they need to be comfortable, and when you leave them alone and come back to check on them, they simply have not been able to look after themselves. But for the vast majority, it does work. People are in a safe space where they can look for work, have an address to put down on applications, and all that.
Quite affordable too; ambulance rides and jail visits aren’t cheap.
Why does it even need to be a transaction? We help each other because it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t need to result in anything other than gratitude and happiness.
