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$750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

latimes.com

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Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#191

Post by medvezhenok »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #135
ecommerceguy wrote: post #91

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…

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…

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.

There is no equivalent fear today.

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#192

Post by Georgelemental »

brnt wrote: post #146
Georgelemental wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! But even with the best education and social support, a small minority will still turn to victimizing others, and no progress is possible until they are neutralized.

I think getting it down to a small minority would already be great progress! Not sure getting it down to zero is the right or primary goal though. It sounds like an excellent way to require ever larger budgets and fund some pork machine. Let's first get it down, then worry about going to zero. Has anyone ever managed zero? At what cost?

> I think getting it down to a small minority would already be great progress!

We've already reached that point! Crime follows a power law distribution, a tiny sliver of the population is responsible for the vast majority of crime. (The size of the sliver varies, in some places it is 0.1% while in others it reaches 2%, but the vast majority are law-abiding always.)

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#193

Post by mbgerring »

ciguy wrote: post #22
mbgerring wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[flagged]

I worked directly with unhoused people in San Francisco as a direct service provider for 2 years, and I promise you, what is more insulting is when people refuse to accept the findings of the large, long-term empirical studies on this subject.

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#194

Post by creer »

aziaziazi wrote: post #187
creer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. Fortunately the study itself looked a little beyond "improved"! This thread was objecting to the stupidity of the headline.

I guess you’re right as another comment mention headline… I did not got it right: I assumed we’re talking about the articled, not only the title. May you point out why your original comment is about the headline and not the topic itself? Me and my English skills will be grateful.

monsecchris wrote "If that’s the best they can say about $750 a month, it sounds like a terrible investment."

Good point that there is no explicit reference to the headline. And yet it was completely clear to me, at first glance, that this was about the headline.

There is a reference. "THAT" refers to the headline's criteria ("improved"). The headline is the closest thing to this "that" - rather than some other part of the article. It's still slim because really the rest of the article is not much further (Good luck LLMs). What clinches it is "that" reference matches logically:

Logically: First this was also my immediate reaction to the headline: it is content-free. "$750/m no questions asked" would improve anyone's life. "improve" is not a useful way to judge this experiment. The headline is absurd. Second: I expected that the study looked at more than that - but only so far - more "hoped" than expected. Third: Then "If THAT's the best they can say" makes sense. It's a quip (short, sarcastic, funny, sadly true) and a realistic one, at the bar that the article editorial crew picked. We often see studies that boast ... but show very marginal results. Is THAT really the best the study got? In fact no, the study measured more (arguably - it's far from bullet proof because of dumb self reporting [did you buy drugs with this? how about with other money?]). They have more of a claim to success. But either the editors were stupid in writing their headline, OR - quite possible - they were sarcastic. Indeed people are aware that it's going to be easy to dismiss the study "It may not be earth-shattering that providing money is going to help meet basic needs" says one of the people involved.

So anyway, "that" was a weak reference. But it had a strong logical match to the headline.

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#195

Post by ciguy »

mbgerring wrote: post #193
ciguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I worked directly with unhoused people in San Francisco as a direct service provider for 2 years, and I promise you, what is more insulting is when people refuse to accept the findings of the large, long-term empirical studies on this subject.

So you're a beneficiary of the homeless industrial complex. Sorry but I'm not interested in anything you have to say as it's impossible for you to be objective given the amounts of money flushed through these programs.

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#198

Post by nshkr »

nshkr wrote: post #182
nshkr wrote: post #31

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…

Some more details: 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 appointmen…

I'm in public as usual, stressed out beyond words, dead set on being dead while eternally afraid to face death.

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#199

Post by ajmurmann »

lukifer wrote: post #180
ajmurmann wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would the negative income tax work in practice? Do I need to wait a full year for my tax return to get a lump sum payment?

That's a good point. It was famously the preferred policy of Milton Friedman (presumably as a cheaper alternative to the welfare state, back when the Overton window was still more FDR than Reagan). A negative income tax might need to be paid out weekly or monthly to make a meaningful difference to the homeless and the working poor (to say nothing of access to banking services; as long as we're waving policy magic wan…

LVT and just giving people money fixes everything! Ezra Klein recently had a guest who talked about baby bonds which matches Thomas Paine's goals: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6NhjzbFvy2B8C7y0O6zhMh?si=N...

Re: $750 a month, no questions asked, improved the lives of homeless people

#200

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

advael wrote: post #186
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

First of all, we don't have to propose an imaginary conspiracy to acknowledge the reality of how we came to think about drugs the way we do: it is documented that the intent of the controlled substances act was to justify criminalizing the political opponents of the Nixon administration. But the downstream effects of this, aside from making medical care much more difficult to access, has been a large amount of money…

No one read that.
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