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Comment by hablog | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds sooo surreal as a guy living in Europe. Maybe you Americans should really look into how social welfare actually reduces these problems and make _everyone_ better off?

Giving free good housing to the homeless has a cost, but is way cheaper than having all this prisons, aggressive cops, literal slums/no-go-areas, security groups, … and a significant share of current homeless/drugusers will contribute to society again over time instead of causing costs.

The US doesn't spend less on social welfare then most European countries per capita [1], it actually spends more than Netherlands and Japan who are renowned for their public transport.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...

Maybe the same problem like in healthcare, where the US spends _a lot_ of money but there are lots of middlemen companies (including insurances) siphoning off the money, and also charge the customers?

Looks like all this money that is spent for some reason doesn’t reach the target somehow, or only a small fraction of it. Sounds insanely wasteful compared to non-privatized operations, as if the system is designed to make private individuals rich instead of focussing on solving the original problem

No, socialism bad.

> Unless we imprison like 20% of the population, busses in most American states will never be clean or safe.

What a horrific philosophy, albeit one shared by a disturbingly large percentage of Americans. Do people in this country really believe they can imprison their way out of every problem? Is fascism really the answer here?

A more humane solution is to actually create a social safety net and redistribute some of the country's vast wealth to help improve the quality of life for the people who are down on their luck, rather than to house them in prisons.

The reason these people are homeless a lot of the times is because they lack housing. Drug usage and crime are a side-effect of this [1].

Denser housing -> Better (frequent, reliable) public transport -> more people use it -> More people want to live in denser housing -> More denser housing is developed -> less homeless.

This is the formula for how Manhattan, brooklyn, and queens were developed by real estate companies. Builders wanted to be near public transport because they knew they could build large apartment buildings and get a bunch of money in rent because a bunch of people wanted to live near public transport so they could get places quickly and reliably.

[1]: Also if we legalized all drugs people wouldn't be forced to turn to criminal organizations. We already do this with alcohol.

People steal bud light. I remember being accosted by an apparently homeless dude with a trash bag full of beer who was handing it out on the tram.

I drank one.

People steal bud light because they can’t afford or don’t want to pay for it, not because it’s illegal to have or consume. The war on drugs had done untold damage to our society by reframing drug problems as a moral problem rather than a medical problem. Black markets pop up immediately once things are banned because, as long as there is a market for it, supply will meet demand.

America is already imprisoning more people than any other comparable country and does not have all that much more crime overall. And crime in America is now significantly lower then a generation ago, despite all the fearmongering.

Fear in America has zero to do with reality of crime.

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