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How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

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Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#231

Post by liber8 »

ergothus wrote: post #198
Consultant32452 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a thought experiment, try to imagine a world with no patent or copyright laws. I'm not suggesting we make that a reality, but just consider it. How would Lockheed Martin, GE, Disney, etc. look? Without local government granted monopolies, how would Comcast look? It would be a completely different world. Look into the concept of regulatory capture. The Dodd-Frank regulations that went into place are a great ex…

> try to imagine a world with no patent or copyright laws I'm not a big fan of the laws as we have them, but sure, i'll play along: > How would Lockheed Martin, GE, Disney, etc. look? ...I'm not sure they'd look substantially different. LM would still only be in competition with a few others because of high barriers to entry. GE...I lack even passing knowledge to speculate. Disney would lose out on a lot of merchandi…

>>BUT my claim is that you have MORE monopolies in (certain) unregulated markets. I can very well be wrong...do you have any evidence to that point?Not to be too cheeky, but do you have any evidence to support your claim that we would have more monopolies without government intervention?

If you look back through U.S. history, how many monopolies has the government actually broken up? Not many. And I don't think anyone can seriously argue that the threat of antitrust action by the government is what has limited the existence of monopolies.

On the flip side, the government has created or protected thousands of monopolies. As the parent mentioned, virtually every city in the U.S. has granted monopolies to local service providers. On a grander scale, U.S. policy has long perpetuated monopolies for the likes of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel by imposing tariffs on foreign goods and raising barriers to entry through licensing and other regulatory hurdles.

It seems self evident to me that for at least the last 200 years U.S. governments in total have done far more to foster monopolies than they have to dismantle them.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#232

Post by saosebastiao »

tomcam wrote: post #220
saosebastiao wrote: post #23

I have no doubt that this program works, even if the success has been overstated [0]. What we really need to think critically about is how exportable the concept is. And really, it comes down to one singular reason, housing costs[1]. High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness, which means that higher housing costs increase…

>High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness Citation needed. Because another reason the homeless migrate to these places is that they spend massive sums on homeless outreach, which draws people in from other areas. I don't know what percentage of homelessness is due to either cause, but I don't see that you do either (not…

It was a logically deductive assertion, although I'm sure there are studies out there. Homelessness is defined as not having a home, and all else equal, a relatively higher cost of having a home will result in relatively more people not having a home. The extent that other city-specific factors contribute to the problem may change absolute numbers in either direction, but relative homelessness should always be higher given higher housing costs.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#233

Post by Domenic_S »

goodcanadian wrote: post #204
ergothus wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh? I won't claim to be an expert (or even close), but it seems to me that remove the vast majority of the overhead of the current web of social programs with a far more simple "Has this person gotten their $X" would free up a bunch of money, even if $X is given to vastly more people. (And I believe that most social programs are relatively efficiently run - those that disagree would consider the benefit of closing th…

It doesn't seem particularly hard to me. You raise taxes slightly to claw back the UBI from people making significantly larger amounts of money. Actually, how I would implement it is as a refundable tax credit in place of the basic deduction. In other words, if you have no income you receive your full UBI. However, you are taxed on your first dollar of income (rather than getting a tax free threshold as you do today)…

You receive your full UBI for the year all at once at tax time? That seems like a recipe for disaster.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#234

Post by dikdik »

mabbo wrote: post #42

The 'Housing First' model was really pushed hard by Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea. But he, like Lloyd Pendleton in this article, apparently figured out that it saves a lot of money, ideology be damned. Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing…

> It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea.

Many Democrats where I live, Southern California, find these ideas quite repugnant. So it's not just the right-wing that needs convincing. In expensive housing markets, people get pretty upset when they see anyone getting something "for free."

It's a childish attitude, but it knows no political ideology.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#235

Post by goodcanadian »

Domenic_S wrote: post #233
goodcanadian wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem particularly hard to me. You raise taxes slightly to claw back the UBI from people making significantly larger amounts of money. Actually, how I would implement it is as a refundable tax credit in place of the basic deduction. In other words, if you have no income you receive your full UBI. However, you are taxed on your first dollar of income (rather than getting a tax free threshold as you do today)…

You receive your full UBI for the year all at once at tax time? That seems like a recipe for disaster.

Details to be worked out. :)

No, of course, I would not propose that. There are many ways to handle it that effectively amount to the same thing. The UBI could be paid out monthly or fortnightly or whatever seemed good with the tax situation otherwise being the same. Your employer would have to withhold a bit more tax to compensate, but the end result would be the same.

The point is not to argue specific implementation details; it is to offer another way of thinking about it.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#236

Post by azakai »

nsnick wrote: post #35
meritt wrote: post #26

Utah didn't solve homelessness. The primary "reduction" was changing the definition of chronic homelessness and now less people are being counted. http://www.aei.org/publication/on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-...

I think you need to read your own article. Its conclusion states, "Utah experienced a less dramatic, but still impressive 71 percent decrease in chronic homelessness since 2005." Are the numbers slightly inflated? Sure. Is it better than anything the west coast is doing? Absolutely.

That's not where the linked article ends, though, that's just page 2 out of 6:

> Utah experienced a less dramatic, but still impressive 71 percent decrease in chronic homelessness since 2005. Yet should we trust even the point in time counts? In fact, [..]

So the article is not just claiming the numbers are merely "slightly inflated" as you state.

(I didn't read the rest in detail, so I'm not saying the points are valid or not. Just that your quote is out of context.)

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#237

Post by kcorbitt »

Symmetry wrote: post #187
tn13 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . The US has known for at least a decade that spending more on IRS agents would earn more money than it would cost. Isn't that proven to be a mostly false notion? Lower taxes tend to bring in more revenue and create more employment.

Your referring to an idea called the Laffer Curve. It's true that the government would bring in essentially $0 revenue with an income tax rate of 0% and it's, well, more or less true for a tax rate of 100% too. And so logically there is a point between those two where revenue is maximized. But in the US at least we're no where near that point. For people payed in proportion to their labor like people working hourly j…

But government revenue is almost certainly the wrong thing to optimize for. You probably want to optimize for something closer "wellbeing of the median citizen," although there's of course a lot of disagreement on what the actual right metric is.

This is a very practical difference. For the sake of easy math, let's assume that the maximum-revenue point on the curve is a 50% tax rate. It then follows that for every % you charge someone over 50%, tax revenue decreases. Which means that at this rate, every additional X% of tax is actually decreasing total economic output by 2X%! And assuming that we're on a smooth curve, that means that every X% you DECREASE your tax from the Laffer point is creating 2X% of economic value. Now, based on how fairly the created value is distributed and how efficiently you believe the government can spend its tax revenue you may have a different opinion on how much value you're comfortable destroying to increase tax revenue, but I'd submit that 2X is quite a high number.

I believe we need much-higher-than-0 taxes, but "we're still below the Laffer point" is a poor argument for raising them.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#238

Post by analyst74 »

hackermailman wrote: post #65

Vancouver tried the same thing. The made a policy of eradicating homelessness by X date and the city bought up SROs to put them in and other housing options. The problem is once the rest of Canada's homeless heard about this they came in droves, often given one way bus tickets by police, so it's impossible to solve chronic homelessness without some kind of national effort. Utah this strategy works because there isn't…

Medicine Hat tried the same thing, and it seems to have worked pretty well.

Maybe we don't have to go all-in or nothing, but start with less desirable cities.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#239

Post by wallace_f »

mabbo wrote: post #42

The 'Housing First' model was really pushed hard by Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea. But he, like Lloyd Pendleton in this article, apparently figured out that it saves a lot of money, ideology be damned. Maybe that's a good example of how to get right-wing…

This is a great example to support a hope for the day ideology retreats from mainstream consciousness as acceptable thinking. Today, it dominates acceptable thinking about politics.

By contrast, science, which relies on testing hypothesis, is a method that has propelled the world forward. Could you imagine if we still thought ideologically about nature--Isaac Newton did, and that's why he spent so much time on his work with alchemy and in the Bible.

It's easy for smart people to get caught up in ideology, but it won't bring us closer to solving problems.

When Feynman famously defined what science is, he said 'it doesn't matter what university you went to, who your advisors were, how smart you are, or what your last name is, all that matters is if it agrees with nature.'

Hopefully more and more will start supporting policies on the basis of evidence that they improve human welfare (i.e. economic, health, education outcomes), rather than if they fit into their ideology.

Re: How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

#240

Post by [deleted] »

ergothus wrote: post #115
tn13 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> . The US has known for at least a decade that spending more on IRS agents would earn more money than it would cost. Isn't that proven to be a mostly false notion? Lower taxes tend to bring in more revenue and create more employment.

> Lower taxes tend to bring in more revenue and create more employment. Two responses: 1) A bit of an irrelevant point, since we're not talking about RAISING taxes, we're talking about collecting taxes that are due under current rules. (You can argue that's an effective tax increase, but I doubt people/companies that aren't following the rules are a good basis for policy - with lower taxes they'll still cheat) 2) But…

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