As someone who is nearing 2,000 days of two stints of homelessness since 2017, I can offer feedback that such an amount would help to alleviate basic survival pressures.
But, money will not solve any root cause issues. I've been unhoused and out of work for so long that any recovery back to a normal life has become exceedingly unlikely. I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke, nor do I do illicit drugs nor prescriptions. My mental state -- stressed in survival mode -- is very much situational, yet there are underlying factors that have led to a state of permanent dysfunction and reluctance to rebuild.
In addition to food stamps, I've survived on help from lifelong/long term friends and strangers (incl'g from kind souls on hn, on a few occasions, even). One kind stranger at the local coffee shop even tried gifting me
a new MBP/M2/24GB/1TB a few months ago, but my focus is gone and I was unhoused, still being criminally targeted, so I returned the laptop in like new condition to him a week later. (The side reports regarding systemic/criminal abuse against at-risk folks is a separate but related matter.)
These initiatives matter, of course. I'd gladly make use of such money. But, IMO, more important is to focus on root causes at the relevant time -- i.e. in public school settings when unchecked peer abuse occurs, as one example. Such abuse can grow into an irreparable state of dysfunction and life breakdown.
I was functionally homeless for 9 years. Food stamps in America are inconvenient as they aren't accepted everywhere, come with strings attached as to purposes, are a way for others to other their users, require onerous paperwork and blasé treatment like a criminal, and are most often insufficient, especially in big cities and Southern states.
Direct cash aid is little-to-nonexistent because of the cynical and discriminatory presumptions "people should work (even if they're disabled)" and "they'll just buy booze and drugs with it".
I am permanently traumatized by many sounds, including tires crunching on pavement, vehicles passing by, loud boom boom music from trucks, and the presence of cell phone cameras in public.
I am also traumatized by any presence of strangers when my bicycle has broken down, and due to T and H, I cannot be in quiet areas. I was diagnosed with a physical disability but couldnt follow thru on appointments for an untreatable condition while homeless.
I have persistent suicidal ideation. The stress has become enormous lately and today has been absolutely awful. I am shaking and angry, and become particularly stressed during rainfall.
I am outside of a closed starbucks attempting a hack repair on my bicycle brake, awaiting a time to commute without rain.
The long term effects of homelessless have taken a tremendous toll on my mental health and has put me in a state of constant stress and anxiety. I have deteriorated mentally over the years, especially lately. I wouldn't wish this on anyone.
> in public school settings when unchecked peer abuse occurs, as one example. Such abuse can grow into an irreparable state of dysfunction and life breakdown.
Just guessing but probably there is a reason why he mentioned that.
> still being criminally targeted, so I returned the laptop in like new condition to him a week later. (The side reports regarding systemic/criminal abuse against at-risk folks is a separate but related matter.)
Many "progressives" like to claim that punishing criminals is counterproductive, and the real solution to address crime is to fix the poverty, the "root cause". In reality, the opposite is true: crime is one of the major root causes that prevents honest people from improving their financial situation.
What do you mean? Crime does not happen in a vacuum. The idea that people steal because it’s fun or commit fraud because they enjoy seeing their victims suffer is not supported by any sort of rigorous sociological or criminological understanding of social deviance. If you want to fix crime, you need to fix the social ills that cause people to turn to crime to begin with. Of course crime prevents people from improving their financial situation, nobody denies that, but the crime itself is not the cause.
It doesn't need to be either or, you know. Or even those answers at all. Or a mix.
Question is: where can you start to make positive and effective changes? The answer almost certainly includes education and preventing people from falling into poverty. You can fight and deter crime at the same time. You probably need all of those, but I'm pretty sure fighting crime alone isn't very effective.
There is already plenty of evidence of how poverty cripples cognitive capabilities and prevents long-term planning. Getting a leg up and slightly more financial security gives people a longer time horizon to plan forward. Well-off people who try living "in poverty" for short period don't experience the stress like people living in actual poverty and stress and can't understand how bad it is.
The first path out of poverty is giving people some money without strings attached.
Basically, the key factor here appears to not only be money, but an assigned “Miracle Friend” who has recurring check-ins with the individual. The grantees of the funding were all individuals who kept up recurring checkins for some period of time (without being disclosed that this would result in receiving any money).
Google says avg American makes ~$60k/yr and spends ~$600/yr on drinking. 2% of 60k is 1200. So they'd need to be spending as much on weed/cigs/hard drugs as they do on alcohol.
The average is a really misleading statistic here, because alcohol and drug use seem to follow a power law distribution.
The top X% of drinkers drink orders of magnitude more than the average. They skew the average much, much higher than what people think of as how much the "average person" drinks.
According to this news article [1], the "average person" drinks (73.85 + 15.28 + 6.25 + 2.17 + 0.63 + 0.14 + 0.02) / 10 = 9.834 drinks per week!
But the fifth decile (the middle of the distribution) drinks only 0.14 drinks per week --- less than one per month!
I appreciate your analysis but I think the average is too lossy of a statistic to make a good argument here.
if you have $50 and it wont make a difference in getting what you actually need, then fast food and fast thrills are what it will be spent on
if you have $750 or some other threshold, you can try to make a difference to get out of it
its like “give a man a fish” versus “sign up for fishing classes, get books, equipment and train so you’ll never have to be in the situation ever again”
I wonder - I only get a couple generics that literally cost less than $1 to get from my local pharmacy for some reason, but I wonder how much I'm paying in healthcare premiums (particularly employer premiums) that go towards drugs - it's probably much greater than 2% of my income indeed. Wegovy is like $1500/month and selling like gangbusters as an example.
For the recreational stuff, I'd rather make/grow my own, so in one sense they're free, but in the actual sense, they're probably quite expensive once you factor in the equipment; just like any other hobby I suppose. Hell, keeping hives to get honey to make into mead is quite the long way around.
Also need to factor in that since the $750 is a recurring gift that could stop at any time, recipients are incentivized to report that the $750 is spent in good ways.
It is relative easy/simple to calculate this with 'some' accuracy.
If you ask someone how much they smoke per day, (that's pretty consistent) and they respond "2 packs of X brand", then you know the brand, you know the price x365 you can estimate the cost. If you point blank ask me "how much do you spend on pizzas every year", I can't just pull a number out of a hat. I will do the math: €20 per pizza x 1 per month = approx 240.
I bet that average homeless person does too. 2% seems ridiculously low. $15 a month total on drugs? That only makes sense for someone who does no opioids, no stimulants, and just smokes 1 pack of cigs and has a single beer across an entire month.
The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent. (USA)
We need to go back to this. Wealth inequality is damaging society far more than ever. From Onlyfans to Bitcoins Scams, social media platforms has only exacerbated the issue. Will the pendulum swing back to morality and just cause away from lawlessness and perversion? Is there a singular root cause for this behavior? Gen Z maybe the last hope.
No, we don't need to go back to this because it simply doesn't work.
In my country, the top rate of 50% sets in around 70K of income. The top rate is hated so much that it actively curtails people's ambitions. People feel its pointless to level up beyond this point. They won't fight to reach bonus targets because the bonus is cut in half. If they continue to grow in income, many consider working a day less per week, as supplemental income becomes largely useless.
A 92% tax rate, at whatever threshold you set it, means anything you do beyond that point has no point at all.
Further, for organizations to richly reward top leaders, which whilst not popular is very much needed, how do you figure they pay them a high net income? Just do up the gross costs by a factor 10?
Finally, surely you realize true wealth doesn't come from labor?
>The top federal income tax rate was 91 percent in 1950 and 1951, and between 1954 and 1959. In 1952 and 1953, the top federal income tax rate was 92 percent. (USA)
>We need to go back to this.
There were so many deductions and tax breaks back then that, to a first approximation, no one paid anywhere close to that. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 removed most of those deductions as part of the collapsing of tax brackets.
California could lower their income tax rate if they stopped subsidizing older homeowners via prop 13. There are people that pay like $1,000 a year (in property tax) living in million dollar homes.
Wealth inequality is not being caused or exacerbated by Onlyfans and Bitcoin scams or "lack of morality", whatever that means.
Corporate and high income taxes have been slashed. This has been going on for decades, but the prior president and congress gave the wealthiest Americans and corporations a two trillion dollar tax cut - a forty percent reduction in corporate taxes - and this was after one trillion dollars in Paycheck Protection Program "loans", most of which were 'forgiven' and a myriad of other pandemic programs - as well as a wholesale gutting of regulations.
In 1940 if you made $200,000 ($4M today) you were taxed at ninety percent to help out with the war effort because there was a long history of the wealthiest being expected to help out in times of societal emergency. The NY Times claims the Great Recession and COVID were the first exceptions but I'd say it's been going on since Vietnam or so. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/opinion/rich-billionaires...
> you were taxed at ninety percent to help out with the war effort because there was a long history of the wealthiest being expected to help out in times of societal emergency.
Never heard it phrased this way before but I like it. Those that can help more should help more. In fact, most people take pride when they can (over) contribute.
If somebody has a medical emergency on the sidewalk, the doctor walking by would be expected/assumed to help more than Nancy the software engineer.
Nobody would call you insane for expecting the doctor help more because they are more capable.
The rich were willing to accept the taxes at the time because of fear of communism (there was a strong communist movement in the U.S., and they had seen the communists expropriate (a.k.a. strip people of) private property in Russia in 1917 & China (after the revolution) at the time.
This is also partly why post-war Europe introduced generous social programs - as a way to prevent people from being seduced into communism.
Woah, had no idea it was that high. And that's in a decade that is considered one of the best in US history (if you were the "right" demographic of course).
Any idea what the top tax bracket was that had that rate? Wonder what it would be now adjusted for inflation.
The headline as written should surprise no-one. Anyone receiving free money would probably have their life improved along some dimension, even if it just means they're not doing as many dangerous things to get money to buy more drugs. The implicit assumption seems to be that giving homeless people money to improve their lives is inherently a moral good.
Unlike many homeless advocates, I don't think it is a given that taking money by force from productive hardworking people and giving it to mentally ill drug addicts is inherently moral or good for long term societal stability.
I think a lot of productive hardworking people's money has been spent on propaganda whose sole intention is to ensure that people equate homeless people to "mentally ill drug addicts" rather than, say, "private equity real estate buyup refugees"
How many homeless people do you interact with daily? Because I'm forced to interact with many of them on a daily basis to simply go about my life in the Bay Area. And almost all of them, with very very few exceptions are both mentally ill and drug addicts. I used to think like you, but being forced to deal with them in real life on a daily basis has a way of killing preconceived convenient notions.
What would the point of a propaganda campaign like that be?
What evil organization is paying on the backend to make sure homeless people do not receive money?
Argue in good faith. People are skeptical that their money should go to people that have not earned it. That is the reality of the argument. It isn’t a conspiracy that many people equate homeless to drug addiction, it’s fact. It is also fact that homelessness isn’t always the guy sleeping in the street, but the single mom sleeping on a friend’s couch for as long as possible.
This is just another “it’s really easy to spend other people’s money” issue.
Read the article, or read the recent UCSF study on homelessness[0]. The data suggest that mental illness and drug addiction are both symptoms of, or exacerbated by, homelessness, not causes of it.
Please don’t argue with me about this here without citing the available data.
The article is not based on a random sample of homeless people. If you read the article, and ideally the article linked within, you'll notice that both the control and treatment groups are from a set of people who have been able to maintain ongoing relationships with 'buddies', in person or on the phone.
The linked study claims to be based on a representative sample of homeless people, but the sampling approaches detailed on page 14 don't give me confidence that this is true. This part is particularly problematic: "This process
continued with participants referring us to members
of their communities who then referred us to others."
The final weighted sample might be representative based on some demographic criteria (e.g. ethnicity, age) but weighting it to achieve that doesn't magically make it representative of the overall homeless population in other respects.
“It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs, but I do think it dispels this myth that people will use money for illicit purposes,” Henwood said. “We weren’t finding that in the study.”
> taking money by force from productive hardworking people and giving it to mentally ill drug addicts
Taxing is not immoral, and it's not just given to mentally ill drug addicts. That's a bad and wrong frame. You almost make it sound like you would cheer when it is given to the mentally ill non-users, or to mentally healthy addicts.
But that's not really your point, is it? Just say: "I don't want to pay taxes." The implication of course is: you don't care about the state, and the help it offers others. Usually that principle lasts until you get in trouble, or can do a profit from government funds.
The fact that you call all homeless people "mentally ill drug addicts" is very telling. Do some basic research. I hope you find some empathy in your heart.
I don't need to research, I deal with them on a daily basis just to go about my day because in my town they are everywhere. The fact that you are ready to simply dismiss someones lived experience based on a few flawed studies tells me everything I need to know about your agenda.
Why would you even ask a question like this? It’s clear that our society has issues that stem from people’s inability to navigate our complicated modern world. Your “why not just let them suffer” provocation adds nothing productive to this discussion.
During covid in Australia, we just put the homeless in hotels. It didn't cost much in comparison to the other government spending around that time and homelessness was largely eliminated. Then we got over the pandemic and tossed people out onto the street. Homelessness for some is a choice by society. Especially in the west.
Lots of "solutions" to homelessness are possible if you're willing to take away their rights, which is what happened to them (and many others) during the pandemic.
Failing to appreciate egoistic cooperation is a peculiar mainstay of our culture. Both the fixed ideas of cooperation for the greater good, and radical self-reliance are put on a pedestal, and often pursued to the point of irrationality.
Readit News
But, money will not solve any root cause issues. I've been unhoused and out of work for so long that any recovery back to a normal life has become exceedingly unlikely. I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke, nor do I do illicit drugs nor prescriptions. My mental state -- stressed in survival mode -- is very much situational, yet there are underlying factors that have led to a state of permanent dysfunction and reluctance to rebuild.
In addition to food stamps, I've survived on help from lifelong/long term friends and strangers (incl'g from kind souls on hn, on a few occasions, even). One kind stranger at the local coffee shop even tried gifting me a new MBP/M2/24GB/1TB a few months ago, but my focus is gone and I was unhoused, still being criminally targeted, so I returned the laptop in like new condition to him a week later. (The side reports regarding systemic/criminal abuse against at-risk folks is a separate but related matter.)
These initiatives matter, of course. I'd gladly make use of such money. But, IMO, more important is to focus on root causes at the relevant time -- i.e. in public school settings when unchecked peer abuse occurs, as one example. Such abuse can grow into an irreparable state of dysfunction and life breakdown.
hth
With those taken care of, tackling the other problems becomes easier. Not easy, but easier.
This is an unfortunate reality. A person can become broken and doesn't want to be fixed.
Direct cash aid is little-to-nonexistent because of the cynical and discriminatory presumptions "people should work (even if they're disabled)" and "they'll just buy booze and drugs with it".
I am permanently traumatized by many sounds, including tires crunching on pavement, vehicles passing by, loud boom boom music from trucks, and the presence of cell phone cameras in public.
I am also traumatized by any presence of strangers when my bicycle has broken down, and due to T and H, I cannot be in quiet areas. I was diagnosed with a physical disability but couldnt follow thru on appointments for an untreatable condition while homeless.
I have persistent suicidal ideation. The stress has become enormous lately and today has been absolutely awful. I am shaking and angry, and become particularly stressed during rainfall.
I am outside of a closed starbucks attempting a hack repair on my bicycle brake, awaiting a time to commute without rain.
The long term effects of homelessless have taken a tremendous toll on my mental health and has put me in a state of constant stress and anxiety. I have deteriorated mentally over the years, especially lately. I wouldn't wish this on anyone.
I do not want any help.
Aloha.
Just guessing but probably there is a reason why he mentioned that.
Dead Comment
Many "progressives" like to claim that punishing criminals is counterproductive, and the real solution to address crime is to fix the poverty, the "root cause". In reality, the opposite is true: crime is one of the major root causes that prevents honest people from improving their financial situation.
Question is: where can you start to make positive and effective changes? The answer almost certainly includes education and preventing people from falling into poverty. You can fight and deter crime at the same time. You probably need all of those, but I'm pretty sure fighting crime alone isn't very effective.
Here is the interim report of the randomized controlled trial: https://dworakpeck.usc.edu/sites/default/files/2023-12/Mirac...
There is already plenty of evidence of how poverty cripples cognitive capabilities and prevents long-term planning. Getting a leg up and slightly more financial security gives people a longer time horizon to plan forward. Well-off people who try living "in poverty" for short period don't experience the stress like people living in actual poverty and stress and can't understand how bad it is.
The first path out of poverty is giving people some money without strings attached.
On the psychology of poverty https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1232491
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1238041
Basically, the key factor here appears to not only be money, but an assigned “Miracle Friend” who has recurring check-ins with the individual. The grantees of the funding were all individuals who kept up recurring checkins for some period of time (without being disclosed that this would result in receiving any money).
I'm pretty sure that the average American spends more than 2% of their income on drugs.
> > Oh uhhh... like $15.
> Okay, thanks. I am writing that down in my report. Now it is a fact.
However it might be interesting as a control is to give some random non-homeless people $750 to see how they spend their money.
I think it's close, but unlikely?
The top X% of drinkers drink orders of magnitude more than the average. They skew the average much, much higher than what people think of as how much the "average person" drinks.
According to this news article [1], the "average person" drinks (73.85 + 15.28 + 6.25 + 2.17 + 0.63 + 0.14 + 0.02) / 10 = 9.834 drinks per week!
But the fifth decile (the middle of the distribution) drinks only 0.14 drinks per week --- less than one per month!
I appreciate your analysis but I think the average is too lossy of a statistic to make a good argument here.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
if you have $50 and it wont make a difference in getting what you actually need, then fast food and fast thrills are what it will be spent on
if you have $750 or some other threshold, you can try to make a difference to get out of it
its like “give a man a fish” versus “sign up for fishing classes, get books, equipment and train so you’ll never have to be in the situation ever again”
For the recreational stuff, I'd rather make/grow my own, so in one sense they're free, but in the actual sense, they're probably quite expensive once you factor in the equipment; just like any other hobby I suppose. Hell, keeping hives to get honey to make into mead is quite the long way around.
Do you think the average American would self-report more?
If you ask someone how much they smoke per day, (that's pretty consistent) and they respond "2 packs of X brand", then you know the brand, you know the price x365 you can estimate the cost. If you point blank ask me "how much do you spend on pizzas every year", I can't just pull a number out of a hat. I will do the math: €20 per pizza x 1 per month = approx 240.
"Hey we gave $750/ month to these homeless guys- yes the ones dressed in those brown rags and with that strange haircut- they were so thankful."
We need to go back to this. Wealth inequality is damaging society far more than ever. From Onlyfans to Bitcoins Scams, social media platforms has only exacerbated the issue. Will the pendulum swing back to morality and just cause away from lawlessness and perversion? Is there a singular root cause for this behavior? Gen Z maybe the last hope.
In my country, the top rate of 50% sets in around 70K of income. The top rate is hated so much that it actively curtails people's ambitions. People feel its pointless to level up beyond this point. They won't fight to reach bonus targets because the bonus is cut in half. If they continue to grow in income, many consider working a day less per week, as supplemental income becomes largely useless.
A 92% tax rate, at whatever threshold you set it, means anything you do beyond that point has no point at all.
Further, for organizations to richly reward top leaders, which whilst not popular is very much needed, how do you figure they pay them a high net income? Just do up the gross costs by a factor 10?
Finally, surely you realize true wealth doesn't come from labor?
>We need to go back to this.
There were so many deductions and tax breaks back then that, to a first approximation, no one paid anywhere close to that. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 removed most of those deductions as part of the collapsing of tax brackets.
In Texas, they would be paying $25,000 / year.
Corporate and high income taxes have been slashed. This has been going on for decades, but the prior president and congress gave the wealthiest Americans and corporations a two trillion dollar tax cut - a forty percent reduction in corporate taxes - and this was after one trillion dollars in Paycheck Protection Program "loans", most of which were 'forgiven' and a myriad of other pandemic programs - as well as a wholesale gutting of regulations.
In 1940 if you made $200,000 ($4M today) you were taxed at ninety percent to help out with the war effort because there was a long history of the wealthiest being expected to help out in times of societal emergency. The NY Times claims the Great Recession and COVID were the first exceptions but I'd say it's been going on since Vietnam or so. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/opinion/rich-billionaires...
Never heard it phrased this way before but I like it. Those that can help more should help more. In fact, most people take pride when they can (over) contribute.
If somebody has a medical emergency on the sidewalk, the doctor walking by would be expected/assumed to help more than Nancy the software engineer.
Nobody would call you insane for expecting the doctor help more because they are more capable.
This is also partly why post-war Europe introduced generous social programs - as a way to prevent people from being seduced into communism.
There is no equivalent fear today.
Reread it please.
"From Onlyfans to Bitcoins Scams, social media platforms has only exacerbated the issue."
Any idea what the top tax bracket was that had that rate? Wonder what it would be now adjusted for inflation.
What about for the "wrong" demographic? You're saying the huge amount of taxes collected didn't go to them?
Trump manages to pay almost no income taxes for several decades because of a few minor loopholes left behind. Imagine what that meant in the 1950s
Amusingly, that's sometimes spun as what happens after a war - until you wonder what happened to Jimmy Carter's post-war economy.
Unlike many homeless advocates, I don't think it is a given that taking money by force from productive hardworking people and giving it to mentally ill drug addicts is inherently moral or good for long term societal stability.
* homeless because of their severe drug addiction * homeless because they can’t afford rent
Each group needs different solutions.
What evil organization is paying on the backend to make sure homeless people do not receive money?
Argue in good faith. People are skeptical that their money should go to people that have not earned it. That is the reality of the argument. It isn’t a conspiracy that many people equate homeless to drug addiction, it’s fact. It is also fact that homelessness isn’t always the guy sleeping in the street, but the single mom sleeping on a friend’s couch for as long as possible.
This is just another “it’s really easy to spend other people’s money” issue.
Please don’t argue with me about this here without citing the available data.
0. https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...
The linked study claims to be based on a representative sample of homeless people, but the sampling approaches detailed on page 14 don't give me confidence that this is true. This part is particularly problematic: "This process continued with participants referring us to members of their communities who then referred us to others."
The final weighted sample might be representative based on some demographic criteria (e.g. ethnicity, age) but weighting it to achieve that doesn't magically make it representative of the overall homeless population in other respects.
Dead Comment
Taxing is not immoral, and it's not just given to mentally ill drug addicts. That's a bad and wrong frame. You almost make it sound like you would cheer when it is given to the mentally ill non-users, or to mentally healthy addicts.
But that's not really your point, is it? Just say: "I don't want to pay taxes." The implication of course is: you don't care about the state, and the help it offers others. Usually that principle lasts until you get in trouble, or can do a profit from government funds.
Unless - do you believe we shouldn’t aid ill people at all?
On the other side even the egoistic view would give homeless people money just to have them of streets.