1. Most homeless people have one or more intractable personal problems, such as a medical problem, mental health issue or learning disability.
2. They end up homeless when their intractable personal problems finally cause them to run out of all resources and options and causes their social safety net to fray and come undone. When no one will let you sleep on their couch one more time while job hunting again, etc.
3. There is a huge and deepening affordable housing shortage in the U.S. This goes back decades. Homelessness is a growing trend nationwide because a growing percentage of the population simply cannot afford housing. It is too expensive. Addressing this piece would go a long way towards easing the burden on people with other unsolvable problems. But there is no real will to do so.
Many people on the street do have an income. They just don't have enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle. I have actually studied this space in school and everything.
They also have their own project with their own Patreon that hopefully will go somewhere:
Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of their choices, who are simply choosing to do a thing that you and I believe to be a really bad choices?
A pattern of such choices is labeled "bad work ethic" but at the end of the day, bad work ethic is just a long series of individual choices to do something besides working.
A depressed person is simply not "choosing" to feel the way they do. Every single thought in their head could be marshaling their instinctual brain to resist the downward spiral but they could still lie in bed all day.
Not to say they don't have agency, but some do have a LOT less than others. Some people can go their entire lives without having a crisis of agency or wresting power over their own choices, and some can be battling to do what they intend to do on a daily basis.
People have "responsibility" for the outcomes that happen for them. We still lock up people who murder, or steal from others, even though it can easily be argued that people don't do those things if not in a bad mental state (desperation, mental anguish, etc). But don't conflate that responsibility with full healthy agency and bad morals.
We should instead focus on the outcome we desire - which in my opinion should be to reduce the amount of suffering people go through, and to have a society that takes care of its most vulnerable. If you disagree and think that everyone should fend for themselves and might makes right, I'd say the person with "bad work ethic" has better morals.
But if you're suggesting that this phenomenon is somehow common, then you need to back that up, since it flies in the face of prevailing research on the subject.
All I said was: Some people have bad work ethic. This means people they decide to not work when they should work, which causes them to end up in poverty. Therefore, to reduce poverty, part of our strategy should be doing things that improve work ethic (in addition to doing other things to solve mental illness, etc).
Nothing about that implies or requires any conclusion about whose absolute fault it is that some people are poor.
And it can't anyway, because as you've noted there is no objective answer to such a moral question.
In multiple child comments you've now claimed things like what you say here:
> All I said was: Some people have bad work ethic
No, that's not "All you said". The proof is right there in your original comment. You actually said
> a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic.
and
> Work ethic is a huge part of the problem,
And the point people keep making to you is that this is false. And I can't speak for others, but the reason why it bothers me so much to see people repeating it is because so frequently the people I've seen who are the loudest at saying it and repeat it the most, often have just as bad and often worse "moral failings".
I don't know you, and I won't judge you from what you've posted here - however I do have to say that the fact you keep attempting to shirk from and minimize away from your own comments isn't exactly breaking that trend to my eyes.
Society is complex - and the claim that the reason the poor are poor is mainly/mostly/primarily due to moral failings is flat out false.
And to you that restatement constitutes "attempting to shirk from and minimize away from your own comments". Seriously? It's the same thing with a difference in degree. The degree word "some" overlaps with "huge amount".
So my great crime is replacing "huge amount" with "some", and connecting it to poverty?
Meanwhile, you go ahead and restate what I said as "the reason the poor are poor is mainly/mostly/primarily due to moral failings."
Which is an utterly different, wild, moralistic, absolutist statement that I obviously never made and don't believe. And hypocritical, given how sensitive you seem to be about accurately re-stating what someone has said.
Let me disabuse you of the anti-charitable notion that you've invented in your head implicitly attributed to me: Just because someone has bad work ethic, doesn't mean it's their fault. I've specifically said in this thread that work ethic is changeable by policy and cultural factors. And, I think bad work ethic often isn't the fault of the person with it, but is rather the fault of people you who gaslight the poor into believing that all they can do is wait to be saved by Wise Rich White Leftist Social Engineers.
A huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. A huge proportion of that bad work ethic stems from the cultural effects of messages like yours.
Neither of the previous statements present any moral attribution - they are simple statements of objective, measurable cause-and-effect. (Yes, work ethic is measurable; the effect that your messages have on it could in principle be estimated via survey or experiment).
Honestly, you really seem to want this to be about morality. You want to see evil in people with whom you disagree because it makes you feel more secure in your own beliefs - a world where good people question your morals with powerful arguments is just too uncomfortable. You continue to apply the exact opposite of the principle of charity. It's unfair to others, and unproductive.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-wrong-me...
There is generally a misalignment between your value system and the output your are expecting. In simple terms its called 'Hypocrisy'.
I for one, know that I don't function at all well in the mornings.