It's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs...if you're wealthy enough, you can afford to distinguish between the two parties; if you're not, the two parties are the exact same.

I sympathize with that view, but nearly every decision you make, every day, at every price level, about everything, is a choice between flawed alternatives.

Sure they're different, my point being people only care about the differences once they've reached a certain comfort level.

Neither party is willing to solve homelessness by actually fucking housing people, and you're calling a homeless person a moron because their assessment of the two parties which, to avoid disturbing the existing economic order, mutually assent to that permanent state of crisis, doesn't include enough conciliatory language for you about how Orange Man Bad? Jesus Christ.

So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself.

I don't agree with this. I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing. Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

Treating the "homelessness" as a single problem is naive. I live near homeless encampments and near people who have been quietly living out of their vehicles for 5+ years. Some percentage of the homeless population can be fixed with cheaper housing. Some percentage of people can avoid being homeless altogether with cheaper housing. And some percentage will be homeless regardless of how cheap the housing is (i guess unless it's free and they agree to not break whatever rules/laws apply to them).

Meanwhile both sides just shout at each other and funnel millions of dollars into groups that don't make any real progress and have no accountability. It's the same useless polarization that exists in politics except I'm not even sure it's a political issue at this point given how 1-party the place i live in is.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before. If you know you know.

I'm happy to put it all out there so people can judge where I'm coming from.

I'm not an expert on homelessness, either in a scientific sense or a first-hand one. I have a few long-term friendships with people who have at various points been homeless for a year or more (some traveling, some local to an area). For a couple years, I worked near a few hotspots for where homeless people would gather during the day and/or sleep at night in the downtown of a relatively small city. In college, I often had neighborly chats with the local homeless people who regularly went through the dumpsters in my apartment complex's parking lot. We'd chat whenever we met while I walked out there to take out the trash or let my dog go potty. Shortly after I graduated, some friends (now moved away, employed, and safely housed up!) who were homeless (then as well as when I first met them) moved in with me for a few months when the weather around us was utterly brutal and physically dangerous for them. When it feels safe (and I'm not on my way to appointment), which is pretty often, I stick around to chat a bit when a stranger approaches me to beg or vent about their life or meet my dog or whatever, whether they seem likely to be homeless or not.

I have seen people violently raving to themselves or at passersby, and I have seen people fight viciously over spaces in which to sleep or beg. I've conversed with people who seemed very lucid and insightful in some ways and paranoid or mentally disorganized in others. I have nervously avoided some people who were so agitated and incoherent that it made me feel unsafe. But admittedly, I have not ever lived in a huge city which has truly massive encampments of desperate people.

Over the years, I have talked in depth with people, including presently and formerly homeless people, about housing, employment, physical health, mental health, capitalism, familial rejection/abandonment, drug addiction, etc., and how those things relate to homelessness.

Personally, I think homelessness is a problem that requires a multifaceted approach to make people physically and financially secure, and to embed them in meaningful personal and professional supporting relationships in their communities. I think that approaches to addressing homelessness falling under the broad banner of 'housing first' are humane, scientific, and workable. And to me, access to housing as a public good is indeed way more important than promoting individual ownership of single-family homes (fwiw, like you, I'm a renter who'd rather not be).

But my main point in that remark you're replying to is that it's useless and incredibly tone-deaf to scold someone who is currently struggling with that level of hardship and societal rejection/abandonment for not buying into the prevailing political system, or for having a perspective in which the important similarities between the two parties are more salient than their differences.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates, while I cannot afford to buy house myself.

Who says it has to be your tax money? There are plenty of millionaires and billionaires in this country, and yet for some reason the only solutions that ever get traction are to put the tax burden on literally everyone other than the people with the most wealth. Hmm, gee, I wonder why? Probably nothing to do with the political duopoly said millionaires and billionaires bankroll, right?

> I don't think homelessness can be solved by building more housing.

It definitionally can and is solved by building housing for the people who lack housing.

> So to be clear, you are saying my tax money should be used to house the homeless, at exorbitant rates

Yes.

> While I cannot afford to buy a house myself

Affordable housing should be a right to everyone. Anyone, including you, should have the option to live in affordable housing that is nice, ideally with amenities and gardens and common areas if they cannot afford to pay for that on their own. Public housing, like it is in some other countries, should be not a stigmatized fallback but the normalized default. And that’s what the property taxes on the home I currently own should be paying for, so if — for whatever reason — I can no longer afford it or no longer want it, I can move into a dignified public housing accommodation too.

> Not sure if you have lived near homeless encampments before

I have. And my conclusion doesn’t change— they should have housing. Nice housing and the help they need to get back on their feet. We all should.

The parties are different in all the ways that don’t matter.

This is an insane statement. Abortion rights do matter. Voting for veterans and 9/11 firefighters to get healthcare matters. Restricting voting right matters [0]. Not giving in to radical christians (as a christian myself) matters.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2pwhvt/the_differ...

Don’t you see the game they’re playing with you? All those things listed in the thread they haven’t passed. It’s not because one party wants it any other party doesn’t. It’s because they both don’t want them and they play the game of “we don’t have enough votes“. It’s like how Obama could’ve codified roe versus wade in the law, but never did.

> All those things listed in the thread they haven’t passed

He says while confronted with a list of every Democrat voting for important things, and important things ultimately not passing because Republicans block it.

> It’s not because one party wants it any other party doesn’t

It's literally only that. You can look at their voting records.

> It’s like how Obama could’ve codified roe versus wade in the law

Obama had a 2 month window of a supermajority, which he used to push the biggest healthcare reform the US has ever seen.