$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
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Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#2Of course it did. The question or debate is not if unconditional money helps, but if it's better than alternatives which may be cheaper, such as food credits. Even middle class people would benefit, like $750 to buy groceries. Inflation obviously will erode some of this new purchasing power.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#3The 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.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#4If that’s the best they can say about $750 a month, it sounds like a terrible investment.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#5Of course it did. The question or debate is not if unconditional money helps, but if it's better than alternatives which may be cheaper, such as food credits. Even middle class people would benefit, like $750 to buy groceries. Inflation obviously will erode some of this new purchasing power.
The point is not that it helped, the point is that they used it to exit homelessness. This is important because of the pervasive and empirically incorrect assertion that people do not have housing because they simply choose not to.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#6The question is more if your fellow humans appreciates you enough to help you.
On the other side even the egoistic view would give homeless people money just to have them of streets.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#7The 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…
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"
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#8Of course it did. The question or debate is not if unconditional money helps, but if it's better than alternatives which may be cheaper, such as food credits. Even middle class people would benefit, like $750 to buy groceries. Inflation obviously will erode some of this new purchasing power.
A lot of the debate is very sincerely arguing that it doesn't actually help, so making it clear that it really actually does is important to shut down some of the ignorance:
“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.”
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#9Of course it did. The question or debate is not if unconditional money helps, but if it's better than alternatives which may be cheaper, such as food credits. Even middle class people would benefit, like $750 to buy groceries. Inflation obviously will erode some of this new purchasing power.
The government is very good at giving people money. It's less good at adjudicating whether people require that money. Replacing every government assistance program with direct, unconditional cash transfers would almost certainly be cheaper than the bureaucracy that must be maintained to ensure only "deserving" people get assistance.
Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people
#10The 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…
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.
0. https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/our-studies/califor...