Studies have shown that it would be cheaper to simply house people than the wild hoops they have to jump through.

Helping the poor is big business, which creates a backwards incentive structure. No one is willing to press these companies to the wall, but hey, they can have rewards ceremonies and drive nice cars. They must be doing something great with all those accolades even though more dead bodies are dumped in the bay each year, right?

Didn't a US city try that and confirm that you are correct? I mean, it's not just studies but also real world experience. Or to put it another way: the studies were studying real world interventions, for instance this one

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10737824

examined a program that ran for five years with a high success rate.

There is a readable article on this at https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/02/housing-first-s...

When half your country frame it as: makers VS takers.

Then "simply need help" would be a significant policy change.

Lots of other developed countries have made inroads on poverty. Just look.

> When half your country frame it as: makers VS takers.

I have never heard of that term before. What does that mean?

> Then "simply need help" would be a significant policy change.

Again, governments are based on policies and rules. "simply need help" is way to abstract.

> Lots of other developed countries have made inroads on poverty. Just look.

Which policies and rules used by other governments do you recommend?

Conservatives in the deep south I find have belief in this, they think that giving money to people that have none is fundamentally stealing from them through taxation and then giving it to someone that doesn't work as hard as them.

As opposed to giving it to defense contractors or farm subsidies. It's funny how conservatives only focus on tax dollars going to the poor.

Similarly, I find it "funny" (tragicomical) when poor Americans lists expenses and then complain about how much income tax they pay.

To be fair, the poor have a high tax burden in the US compared to other industrialized countries. And they get fairly little for their taxes... Still an Uber driver who complains about taxes being high is sad, because lower taxes will only hurt him.

Not sure that's true. If you're low income enough you don't pay taxes and actually get money back through the EITC.

What is the cutoff?

And yes, I didn't say they were rational players :)

Which the article says, we shouldn't expect.

On the contrary, as a southerner, I see plenty of northerners move down here and spend more fighting property taxes than paying them because their kids are grown and they shouldn't have to pay for schools any more.

Let's not pick "sides" here.

Hehe, similarly, you'll also hear poor Americans complain about taxes.. sure they have a high tax burned relative to rich Americans, when compared to others developed countries.

But complaining about taxes doesn't reduce poverty.

When people who are receiving help are those I remember in grade school ignoring school work to focus on bullying others (myself included), I definitely feel this way. There is no reallocation of social resources that I lack due to previously mentioned experiences, so I feel there shouldn't be reallocation of fiscal resources to help those that participated. (And I use 'feel' because I know this isn't a rational line of thought.)

This response unintentionally demonstrates what I think is a huge part of this puzzle: that government is the default "fixer" of this problem. That's an easy assumption to make, because it removes all personal responsibility while assuaging one's conscience. The Bystander effect in full force. What if we instead start assuming it is -our- responsibility to help the helpless?

Many comments in this thread mention the disparity between the Haves and Have-nots in San Francisco. Imagine the impact if all those Haves decided to use their own time and money to aid the homeless/hungry/needy/destitute? Instead, we fall back to blaming the other side's politicians and policies and we hope that someday Big Brother will take care of everything.

This is the kind of thing that needs an institution (government or not) because otherwise the money goes to the most convincingly miserable looking people, not the ones in need. It's hard to prove, but it seems like most of the "homeless" on the NYC subway are just doing an act like the rest of the buskers. There's money to be had, and they've made a job of figuring out how to get it. If you can be sure that the problem is competently handled by the government, you can ignore people asking for handouts and not encourage that behavior.

I'm not just advocating for everyone to give money away on the street. Some of the worst poverty in the U.S. is in places with huge amounts of brain power (like SF). I'm sure those big brains could come up with better solutions than handouts. Like the countless charities out there that are far more efficient than government.

Do you think the problem is, or can be, competently handled by government? I think government can get results by brute-forcing with massive amounts of money, but history shows that it's still terrible at it (hello War on Poverty). Now, I don't mean to say government should have no role/do nothing. I'm saying that it should not be the -default- entity to take care of things because it allows the citizenry to absolve themselves of all responsibility. Government isn't some wise entity - it's just people. And oftentimes those people are thousands of miles away, working with incentive structures poorly aligned with the issue at hand.

One benefit of transforming this issue into a matter of personal responsibility is that the incentives are much stronger - if it's MY money being used, I'm far more likely to strive for efficiency. If your charity gobbles up my donation with admin costs, I'm "shopping elsewhere". A somewhat-related example of this strategy was a method used in Africa to combat elephant poaching. I can't find the reference now, but basically the government decided to "give" land areas to citizens, who would be responsible for poaching issues. It ended up working much better than when the government sought to directly reduce poaching.