> Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money.

This means "stop having social workers".

You can only reduce expenses so far, and the easiest way to earn more money is to get a new job.

Unions & collective bargaining is another option - depending on the profit margins of the companies involved.

Basically, if social workers collectively refused to work for the current pay, either social work would be eliminated (unlikely), or pay would rise - either through government subsidies, or at the expense of profit margins.

True. I wonder if social workers would find themselves in the "not allowed to strike" group of government employees.

A lot of social workers are not government employees, there are a bunch of private counseling practices, NGOs, and hospital systems and the like that employ social workers as well. (I’m only familiar with the situation in the US)

But I think your point stands even aside from any regulatory specifics. Asking social workers to strike for better wages is essentially asking some of the most vulnerable in our society (e.g. kids in the foster system) to bear the brunt of our collective underinvestment in meeting their needs. I think that’s less acceptable of an impact compared to stressing out some BigCorp’s bottom line in the case of Amazon or Starbucks and similar

"I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear from you."

People in the US seem to just hate poor people

You're too kind. It's not hate. It's contempt.

I've decided that many Americans believe that the definition of "freedom" is "freedom from having to even think about people who are outside of my family/social group". The homeless person on the street isn't a tragedy because human beings shouldn't have to sleep on the street, it's a tragedy because I have to see it and think about it.

>Reduce expenses to live within your means

Which is cool until the point that rents take up 100% of your income and then you're screwed.

Let's imagine a world where almost everyone makes $7 an hour. You would expect pricing in the world to reflect that and housing to fit in that budget.

But now in that world you create a small percentage of people that can print as much money as they want. These people that print as much money also have a terrible problem as they are completely greedy and always want more. You'd expect the first outcome of this situation to be asset inflation. The behavior of the greedy would be to buy up as many 'real' assets with their fake money as quickly as possible. Eventually the behaviors of the people earning $7 simply don't matter. The greedy will extract as much wealth as possible and drive up costs beyond the point of survival until a significant portion of the population is tossing the other half of the population in to guillotines.

It is important to keep income inequality under control if you want a stable society (that's not a police state).

True, but many people look back and say “back in the day people could do X” and cherry pick.

What they ignore is how long people lived at home for, how many people jumped immediately into marriage. This whole business of everyone having their own place is not sustainable, despite what we see in TV.

Interesting thing I learned during the pandemic: There are actually countries where more people live alone than in the United States. In particular, in Sweden, the vast majority of all unattached adults, even young ones, live alone, without roommates. So, I have to push back against the idea that a permanent housing shortage forcing people into multi-person living arrangements is the natural default.