Mitigating the anxiety, fear, and lonliness by using nicotine? That's far far higher up. That's the bigger priority in the timeframe of "being fucking homeless".
Same public sector could have provided you a home. You could have had a smartphone, a laptop, AND a roof.
But those smug rich assholes don't make money off that, so therefore you don't have it. You only have the droppings of gov research after it was privatized.
being poor in a developed country has rarely been bad and its hard for many to realize that is true. as for the price of meat the government intervention in grain pricing with regards to pushing ethanol and similar didn't help that.
the rich can weather a bad storm better than the poor but only if they are properly diversified and not relying on the boom to keep them there
Have you ever been poor? I understand that absolute poverty in an undeveloped country is worse, but to make a statement like you have shows that you apparently have very little understanding of the reality of poverty in a developed country.
As I said before, if you eat substandard food, don't give your body stress in manageable amounts (exercise), and are constantly bombarded by a level of stimuli unthinkable to someone from 1800...
Being "poor" or even "homeless" doesn't have to suck as bad. From experience, the whole homeless shelter (particularly within Veteran Affairs) system is ripe for disruption. You wouldn't believe how much money is wasted on absolute bullshit (coughAnyoneWithASocialWorkDegreecough) as opposed to simple procedures and steps which actually help a person to not be homeless.
Two things which persisently keep a lot of homeless people down are a lack of employable skills and a lack of supportive social networks that keep a person "in the game" so that they're not bored and smoking crack.
This process will be over soon when urbanization hits Western levels (about 10-15 years from now), then the growth rate will moderate.
Forget the government figures and look at the market. Sure you might make a buck more an hour but the price of meat has doubled (roughly) in the past five years.
But the curious thing is we live in an era where being poor isn't as fucking horrible as it was in the past. While homeless I was able to have a smartphone, a laptop, and a couple of things of liquid nicotine. That's a sanity keeping pack right there.
I don't care if the rich guy can order custom-made marbelized sculpted horse anuses, my quality of life as a homeless man was increased precisely because rich men were assholes enough to create products general and well-built enough for many environments.
The problem of course is the almost never-ending stream of propoganda which tells people to eat sub-standard food and adopt sub-standard lifestyles. You stuff a population full of terrible diets, little personal physicality, and constant dopaminergic stimulation...
Well I suppose if I were a rich man I'd be chuckling at the peons who are literally segregating themselves physically as a separate species. It'd make breeding and consolidation a bit easier if you could tell a peon visually by their body fat ratio.