But we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget.
The government is the party that should be responsible, and I'm tired of the onus of the responsibility being put on the citizens. Why else do we PAY taxes for if not for these social services?
Where is this?
I think I’m okay with my tax dollars being spent on the following:
1. Social services for the homeless.
2. Police suppression of the homeless.
3. Hygiene discrimination on public infrastructure (with showering and laundry covered in point 1).
4. Much more aggressive fare enforcement. I mean if you have to install kouban in all the BART & Muni stations and train cameras on the gates, that isn’t the worst place to do it.
I don’t want to be heartless, but not all homeless people are the same either. Give them the help they are willing to receive and for the rest that aren’t willing, that commit crime or show up on the bus covered in their own shit, I am A-OK with the police you know, policing. If you have a creative solution that will actually help more people? Great! We’ll try it out and see if it does or doesn’t help in the way that we want, but as an also, not instead of policing.
The issue most people have is the degree to which it's happening.
Very few people literally want homeless people to just die.
But some people might not want to spend 10% of their taxes on the homeless when it doesn't appear to be improving the situation, and does - to some people - appear to be making the situation somehow worse.
Some of the people in that group might be glad to spend 10% of their taxes on the homeless, if it actually worked. In fact, I'd wager many would be willing to spend much more if it would actually work.
But it appears to be a problem that can't be fixed by throwing money on it.
The quote came to mind while I listened to a Radiolab episode on police surveillance [1]. We usually take it to mean opposing tyranny, even when convenient. But that might be too simple.
For every Patrick Henry there are dozens who prefer not to die. If we let the security situation devolve out of sympathy, or inequality increase in pursuit of efficiency, those people will snap and prompt a brutal backlash.
I’m not suggesting we re-criminalise homelessness. But the status quo, with the permanent homeless population, isn’t working. I don’t know how much one quashes one’s sympathy for the less fortunate and sense for technological progress to achieve these ends, but it’s becoming clear we have to explore toward that boundary. Open-air hard drug use, theft of non-essential goods, aggression and refusal to receive psychiatric screening (note: not treatment); these seem like low-hanging fruit to target zero of. Hell, make it part of a grand bargain to improve the transient homeless population’s wellbeing.
We have the fifth highest prison population per capita (behind El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and Cuba), and you want to consider adding potentially another 600,000 (40% more) people to that population?
That would put us at the highest prison population in the world, and it would be not even close. That would be twenty per cent higher than some of the world's most despotic, dysfunctional countries.
And the same people who are not willing to fund socioeconomic initiatives, not willing to fund access to mental healthcare, are also not willing to fund improvements to American prisons which, while not the worst in the world, are certainly not even close to the pack when it comes to humane conditions, improving situation and circumstance, and reducing recidivism.
How would such a person get to leave prison if they were there because they were homeless? They leave prison and they're still homeless (see: already vastly overwhelmed transitional support structures, and a huge influx of additional demand and suffocatingly small desire to improve that situation).
Sorry and thank you. I'll be more blunt: we should not criminalize homelessness, putting these people in jail for being poor or mentally ill or addicted beyond agency is inhumane, and maybe if we deal with this problem we'll be less afraid of dumping the millions of Americans wrongly jailed and withheld from career development by the state back into the world.
It's very hard to a voter base who feel financially squeezed that their taxes should be going to people who, usually, are not holding down a job. They're "doing everything right" and feel the government is robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were.
There are a lot of sophisticated answers we can give as to why the above line of reasoning is wrong (multiple analyses show that, basically, if you're unwilling to literally murder people for being homeless it's cheaper to help them) but it's a hard sell.