Hacker News Reader

Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

Man, I did not sign up to subsidize the homeless of the entire western US, and neither did my fellow Californians.

We definitely need to reduce the social programs and put that $20bn somewhere else.

No matter how you slice it, $609,000/yr per homeless person is simply absurd.

I'm guessing that moving that (actually) $25bn "elsewhere" would actually increase the homelessness problem in California since that money funds a variety of social assistance programs for all manner of people, most of whom have a place to live!

You can see the spend here: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4640

I wouldn't be surprised that most of that money already went somewhere else - mostly middlemen, with the homeless seeing none of it. Perhaps that will give you some piece of mind - you are not giving money to the homeless, you are helping local businesses.

Of course you didn't, it's called the "social contract".

I don't think there is any hope for California, you need to wait for them to crash completely and then you can rebuild from the ashes.

Of course this is especially hard because a lot of profit is made and taxed in California which helps keeping the circus running.

You did and do by living there

And yet by your voting patterns, that’s exactly what you did.

Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Where should the money go if not the social safety net? Will your suggestion get people off the streets? Or should they just rot there?

A safety net is unemployment insurance. What this is isn’t a safety net but rather a hammock.

Okay, you disagree with my wording. Where should the money go that will help?

Well, there is no current social safety net.

Who do you trust to put twenty billion dollars "somewhere else?"

Many of them in government have probably been busy quietly putting it somewhere else for some time now.

The people that earn it. Cut taxes and put that money back in the people’s hands.

How does that solve the problem though? I certainly would be happy if my tax bill went down, but that money is being spent and a lot of it is spent on important things. Are you okay with just ignoring every problem that doesn't personally affect you? Or only this one in particular? I'm not seeing the dots connected here. You need to make at least a somewhat clear argument for how your proposed policy is sound instead of just pushing problems off on someone else.

The first step is to stop incentivizing this kind of behavior. The world runs on incentives and this is no different.

Able bodied drug addicts should be arrested and put into jail. It’s in their best interests. For the rest we have shelters and free food and free skills development and free mental health. Incentive improving one’s condition.

Jail does not help addicts. You can talk to the people who run jails. I have.

Yay for even higher inequality!

A serfdom supported by taxation (theft) isn't exactly the definition of equality. We should be aiming for individual liberty. Equality is a false god.

This kind of comments belong to 4chan, not to HN.

Enjoy your Plato's cave then.

That's exactly right!

It’s a result of voting for Reagan and his dismantling of any support for asylums. Sure, it was cruel but the voters decided to throw the baby with the bath water instead of any kind of nuance.

Additionally, the NIMBY crowd goes against building anything, even with the new “builders remedy” in place. With a majority of homeless being from CA, this has affected everyone - homeowners can’t sell and “upgrade” because supply is too low, which doesn’t help mobility in the lower classes.

The other issue is the toothless law enforcement when it comes to actual crime. That I hope will change when residents of SF get tired of the shenanigans.

I’m against reducing social programs. We need it, especially if the income inequality gap keeps getting wider. We just need to be smarter about how we spend it.

It’s also important to remember that WSJ, and particularly their opinion pieces, are very much a right-wing mouthpiece and loves to dunk on SF and the “poors”.

The lack of a robust asylum system is a huge part of the problem here, at least if you ask anyone in law enforcement. Not all homeless people are mentally ill - I would argue that most aren't - but the chronically homeless and "troublesome" homeless that people complain about are often struggling with untreated issues and there is quite literally nowhere for them to go and nowhere to send them. They won't get treatment in jail, they won't get treatment in shelters, and the emergency room will stabilize them and discharge them (with a medical bill to be paid by the taxpayer).

I didn't sign up to live in a world where someone's wellbeing is tied to their ability to work for someone else's benefit. We all have unchosen obligations.

We all work for someone else’s benefit.

At a certain point those "unchosen obligations" snowball into a gargantuan, suffocating problem for actual taxpayers.

It's not our responsibility to care for the homeless of the entire western US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com