If you're in a poorly made boat that has a hole in it with two other people...
And you are all actively sinking in that faulty boat, about to die in the middle of the ocean...
And one of the people states they will make more holes so you all drown....
And the other wants to work to keep the boat floating enough to get to shore, but not to your ideal...
Who do you help in that moment, or do you fold your hands and sink on principle? And you understand that sinking is not a moral victory here, because you've effectively supported the person who wanted to make more holes and sink the boat.
If you don't get to shore, you won't live to attempt to sue that horrible boat company to hold them accountable and keep others from using their faulty boats. And if you don't help the person bailing out water, the person making more holes will kill you all with less effort.
The "people" above are to represent general philosophies of the two "sides" in this discussion, not insightful candidates. There is no option to truly stay neutral here, direct action or willful inaction, both have impacts that you are responsible for.
What do you do?
This implies that they care about the homeless issue. 23 billion is a rounding error in the budget. They just don't want to fix it.
For those with a skeptical nature, I hunted down these numbers.
HUD does not provide numbers to "end homelessness", they report on the state of homelessness including an estimated census of the homeless.
Some annalists have taken these numbers and multiplied them by the cost to imprison someone, or the average cost of American housing. These estimates come out to $11-30B.
So the numbers check out. The only fault I could find with this meme's claims is that they are slightly misleading in suggesting $20B could "end homelessness" without the caveat that that's only for one year.
20 billion could go a long way to curbing homelessness.
20 billion invested in high density, low rent housing units could make housing more accessible to millions of people, including the homeless.
Remember, not all homeless people are completely jobless. Many are couch surfing or sleeping in their cars, have stables jobs, and just can’t afford rent where their job is. An apartment they can afford could do a lot for these people.
You are correct. I like to focus instead on those lacking shelter who've been completely alienated from society and cannot be 're-rehabilitated'. These are the people who are erased when we speak about how lifestyle or work ethic "redeem" those in extreme poverty.
Lack of housing really isn't the root cause of the homeless epidemic. That money would need to go to revamping the mental health services Reagan destroyed to help the chronically homeless.
Lack of affordable housing is certainly an issue.
When rent is over half of your budget, how do you keep a roof over your head when an emergency comes up.
We need mental health care too, but we also need to correct the housing market in general. Building lots of cheap housing is still a good option.
The new housing development near me is trying to sell brownstones for half a million, and the new condos are going for 250K. They’re all nearly empty because very few can afford them. So we either need higher wages, or actually affordable housing. Ideally we’d get both, it’s not like we don’t have the money to try multiple solutions.
Wages have not kept up with everything else.
American democracy in action.
Homelessness isn't a bug in the system, its a feature. Employers need the threat of homelessness to push wages down and artificially inflate the labor supply. They need high rents to segregate portions of the community into "worthy" and "unworthy". They need car-culture to keep people isolated from one another in between work and home. They need student debt to trap people into corporate jobs, rather than setting out on their own as entrepreneurs, co-operative partners, and social workers. They need mass media to keep people more afraid of "crime" and welcoming of the "police" than they are welcoming of neighbors-in-need and hostile to state surveillance and harassment of dissidents.
The $26.7B we're sending to Israel is money towards an experiment in regional social controls and ethnic domination. If the Israelis can do it over there, the plutocrats back home can do it over here.
Biden just wants to see more dead children
When did we go from "oil companies and tech oligarchs want to exercise their influence over governments to clandestinely achieve greater wealth" to "THE PRESIDENT IS A MONOLITHIC DICTATOR THAT DECIDES ALL FOREIGN POLICY UNILATERALLY"?
Oil companies and oligarchs provide the funding. The person in office still has to make the decisions and still bears responsibility.
More people should play Metal Gear Solid 1-4. Governments don't exist to "help" people, they exist to expand their influence and ideally take over the world. Us civilians are meat for the meat grinder, and at best, mindless drones to tax to fund the meat grinder.
Depends on what class is in control, this is true for dictatorships of the bourgeoisie.
They're more or less the ones in control, so yeah, that's apt.