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Life During Class Wartime

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141–150 of 263 posts

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#141

Post by tbrownaw »

timbray wrote: post #99
JuniperMesos wrote: post #95

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in we…

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.

There is a difference between "most homeless" (your comment) and "most visibly homeless" (comment you're replying to).

IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.

You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#142

Post by amanaplanacanal »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #127
timbray wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.

As an anecdote, two people in my family have been or are homeless (don't know their current situation) entirely because they are incapable of continually making basic, smart financial decisions. At the level of "I decided to just not show up to work today" or "I spent my entire week's pay on a new toy". They both received enormous financial and social support from various people in the family, but always eventually j…

I doubt we will get to the end cause of all the issues in a conversation here, but my understanding is that getting people whatever kind of help they need is vastly easier if they have a roof over their head and a permanent address.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#143

Post by Uhhrrr »

timbray wrote: post #99
JuniperMesos wrote: post #95

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in we…

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.

This meta-analysis puts it at 67%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

What data have you seen which doesn't support it?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#144

Post by pie_flavor »

yabones wrote: post #52

For the vast majority of human civilization, all taxes were based on wealth. Your emperor, pharaoh, czar, or whoever was in charge sent a dude around to take a bit of everybody's stuff. Not how much income they made but how much stuff they actually had . It's only been the last 120-ish years that the idea that wealth and income were totally different things as far as taxation is concerned emerged. I think almost ever…

This sounds completely made up. The medieval taxman has no idea how much gold you have squirreled away, and even finding everyone to tax them was hard enough. Most peasant taxes were based on productive land and observable yields thereof, and the rest were import/export duties. IE income and not wealth, because nobody was stupid enough to implement a negative growth rate until the 21st century (unless they were actively trying to loot holdings for redistribution, e.g. varlık vergisi)

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#145

Post by amanaplanacanal »

jimbob45 wrote: post #111
JuniperMesos wrote: post #95

> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless. I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in we…

At some point, it’s not a shortage. Everyone naturally wants to live in the best city on earth but expecting one city to house 8 billion people is silly. It’s okay to admit that some cities are at their natural reasonable capacity.

Aren't there cities bigger than that though? What causes the capacity limit you are taking about?

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#146

Post by vinyl7 »

enoch_r wrote: post #29
FabCH wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to condone the violence OP is calling for, but we have very recent examples of what happens when somebody does this. The factual answer to your question is: „for a limited time, rejections rates by health insurance companies plummets“

This doesn't appear to be true at all. Do you have a source?

https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/unitedhealth-prior-aut...

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#147

Post by tyg13 »

wrqvrwvq wrote: post #78
tantaman wrote: post #26

Increased taxation would be defensible if it was paired with spending reform. Increasing the tax to just inflate a bureaucracy helps nobody. Increasing the tax and then directly paying people, with no PMC in the middle, seems win-win-win.

I don't think just paying people will make any difference at all. Most of the chronically poor in US at least have underlying problems such as addiction, schizophrenia or other affective disorders. Most chronically homeless people have turned down multiple state subsidized living options or have been booted from them for anti-social behavior. Studies routinely show that 30-40% of food stamps are sold for pennies on t…

> The us govt wastes by some estimates 30% of its budget. Trillions annually. Have to start with the waste and fraud. Empty daycares are not a good use of hard-earned tax dollars and have a massively pernicious effect on the society. They're not taking care of kids or paying teachers. Just pure inflationary greed.

Much can be said about the problem of government waste, and it certainly is a problem, but there's an underlying assumption in this kind of talk, which I'd like to attack. That assumption is: "people are poor because the government taxes them too much, and wastes their money". Republicans in the US run and win on this platform again and again.

The problem is that it's simply not true. Government wealth has been falling for decades[0] -- nations are increasingly rich, but governments are increasingly poor. I don't even need to include a source that shows effective tax rates have been falling for the same period (no surprise -- that's _why_ governments are so relatively poor). As nations have continued to get richer, most of that wealth has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of private individuals.

Governments are not sequestering your wealth -- rich people are.

[0]: https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-3/

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#148

Post by xboxnolifes »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #142
xboxnolifes wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an anecdote, two people in my family have been or are homeless (don't know their current situation) entirely because they are incapable of continually making basic, smart financial decisions. At the level of "I decided to just not show up to work today" or "I spent my entire week's pay on a new toy". They both received enormous financial and social support from various people in the family, but always eventually j…

I doubt we will get to the end cause of all the issues in a conversation here, but my understanding is that getting people whatever kind of help they need is vastly easier if they have a roof over their head and a permanent address.

I agree. But one of these 2 people had subsidized housing through the state. It was incredibly cheap rent for the area. Cheaper than any housing can be just from building more. But they still lost the place after a few months because they did not pay rent and instead bought toys and quit their job. They were receiving money from the family, work opportunities from the family, the family walked them through all of their legal and bureaucratic needs, and the family took care of their children. But it was not enough.

For this subset of people, I don't see how you can help them without managing their finances for them. Even if you completely manage their finances, how do you help them if they just quit every job they get?

I never really thought about it much before them, but I think pretty often about the problem. How do you help someone who can't be helped? Even if you gave them free housing and a weekly allowance, they would still find a way to not have money for food before the next week.

Re: Life During Class Wartime

#149

Post by pstuart »

slibhb wrote: post #138
timbray wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent. Agree on the underbuilding.

Most homeless people aren't mentally ill. But those "huddling in the rain" mostly are, or are at least addicts. Non-mentally I'll homeless people are rarely "street people". They live in a car or with friends or in a shelter. Plenty of them have jobs.

A lot of the young ones are either escaping sexual abuse, thrown out by their family for their sexuality or rejection of religion, or aged out of foster care.

There is indeed a spectrum of homelessness from temporarily distressed to broken beyond repair. There's different actions for the different factions.

I live in the Portland OR metro and believe that the issue has spawned the Homeless Industrial Complex that thrives on extracting money to "help" but are incentivized to keep the problem going for their livelihood.

I'm not unsympathetic to their plight (I had been effectively homeless a couple times in my life). It bothers me to no end how this problem is mismanaged.

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