We should give free money to the homeless

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In summary: Interesting thoughts. Certainly the sample size is far too small, but maybe there is something to take away from this study.In summary, this study found that giving people money without any strings attached helps them to live more satisfying lives. It is time for a radical reform of the welfare state.
  • #1
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Interesting thoughts. Certainly the sample size is far too small, but maybe there is something to take away from this study.

We tend to think that simply giving people money makes them lazy. Yet a wealth of scientific research proves the contrary: free money helps. It is time for a radical reform of the welfare state.

The Economist concluded:
‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’

That spring, a local charity takes a radical decision. The street veterans are to become the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays for them. The men will get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. They'll each receive 3,000 pounds, cash, with no strings attached. The men are free to decide what to spend it on; counseling services are completely optional. No requirements, no hard questions. The only question they have to answer is:

What do you think is good for you?

Eradicating poverty in the United States would cost $175 billion – a quarter of the country’s $700 billion military budget.

Why we should give free money to everyone
https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to-everyone/35246939860-ec3a6c3e

Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/m...m_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed&_r=1&

PROVIDING PERSONALIZED SUPPORT TO ROUGH SLEEPERS
http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/support-rough-sleepers-london
 
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  • #2
It will be interesting to see how this works out. There is an interesting article by Rossi and Wright on the demographics of the homeless. A large fraction is mentally ill, and another large fraction has substance abuse problems.

As far as ending poverty, there is an increasing tendency to define poverty in relative, rather than absolute terms. For example, the EU definition of poverty is earning less than 60% of the median income. A definition like that virtually ensures that poverty will never be eliminated.
 
  • #3
Vanadium 50 said:
A large fraction is mentally ill, and another large fraction has substance abuse problems.

Some mentally ill can get cheap housing and social security checks. They just need someone to help them figure it out and apply.
 
  • #4
Ah, but will 3000GBP do that?

The Rossi/Wright article is very interesting on a number of levels. It's really very descriptive, whereas a lot of social science articles tend to be proposing some solution or other, and amazingly the data supports that. They acknowledge that studies in different places provide different results (not surprisingly - you have to be a lot tougher to be homeless in Minneapolis in January than Berkeley). But what I found most interesting is that there is a particular subpopulation that has a very common trajectory into homelessness, and this might need a different solution than the remainder.

It goes like this - a guy (most are male) loses his job and cannot find a new one. Mental illness, substance abuse and past criminality may play a role in this, as might simply a lack of skills. He moves in with relatives, often for years (typical was around 3), and then there is an event after which his relatives no longer feel safe so he is no longer welcome. These events may be related to mental illness, substance abuse and/or criminal behavior or associates.

Given a pattern, one has several lines of attack on how to break it.
 
  • #5
I would be interested to learn where all this 'free' money comes from.

Despite repeated attempts, no one has developed a money tree which you can grow and harvest in your back yard, geese stubbornly refuse to lay golden eggs, and no one has yet to find that pot o' gold at the end of the rainbow.

'Free' money is all-to-often extracted (extorted?) by government from the hard-working middle class through taxes, and then diverted up or down the income ladder, depending on the whims of those in the various legislative bodies around the world.
 
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  • #6
SteamKing said:
I would be interested to learn where all this 'free' money comes from.

Ben Bernanke doesn't seem to have a problem finding the money tree :)

SteamKing said:
'Free' money is all-to-often extracted (extorted?) by government from the hard-working middle class through taxes, and then diverted up or down the income ladder, depending on the whims of those in the various legislative bodies around the world.

I think ending homelessness and putting a big dent in poverty should be a top priority. Plenty of money is wasted in far less worthy causes. I believe the article states we could hypothetically end poverty with $175B.
 
  • #7
BB has found the money tree like Ponce de Leon found the Fountain of Youth: sadly, neither exists, but I fear that when the QE tap is turned off, we will all suffer in one way or another, in terms of rampant inflation, a continuation or worsening of the current recession, or perhaps even a depression.

The government is busy wishing inflation away, carefully selecting the commodities which they track in order to say inflation is currently low, but anyone who shops for food and energy in particular knows that prices have risen significantly in recent years while purchasing power continues to decline.

And I would be particularly wary of anyone who claims, "And for the low, low price of $X billion, we can end poverty!" Since the 1960s in the US and Europe, trillions of dollars have been spent on various programs to end poverty, provide universal health care, subsidized education and housing, minimum incomes, job training programs, etc. And guess what? Poverty is still here, but it is living in more comfortable surroundings than before. The problem will only get worse, because the populations of western countries have been shifting markedly to an older mean age, which means that more resources have to be devoted to providing pensions and health care for the elderly and retired, but there are proportionally fewer younger workers to provide for each retired or elderly benefit recipient. Sure, governments can print money to make up the difference temporarily, but eventually, this catches up with you, and you start to suffer the ill-effects of inflation eating away at your economy.

It's been proven time and again that you can't spend your way to prosperity, but sadly, many have yet to learn this lesson and probably never will.
 
  • #8
Greg Bernhardt said:
I think ending homelessness and putting a big dent in poverty should be a top priority. Plenty of money is wasted in far less worthy causes. I believe the article states we could hypothetically end poverty with $175B.
Hypothetically, why would anyone currently below the poverty line not immediately quit their jobs if everyone below the poverty line were handed money to raise them to the poverty line?
 
  • #9
Anecdotal, but it is consistent with the evidence: I have three friends that were given inheritance (on independent occasions). The first reduced his tech support job hours... and started an electronics recycling business and fabrication shop. The second continued to work as a cabbie half-time, and spent the other half of his time trading stocks (he has a business degree); he's also developing land to live on for a while, then sell once he develops it (raising its value). The third (who never had a real job in the first place) moved to a tropical location and started a business that removes invasive species for the state and also started a lab working on superconductors.

Between that and my own experiences, I'm left with the feeling that doing nothing is painfully boring and sometimes even shameful for the majority of the population.
 
  • #10
Russ the study in the first post has evidence that people generally don't behave that way.
 
  • #11
Pythagorean said:
Between that and my own experiences, I'm left with the feeling that doing nothing is painfully boring and sometimes even shameful for the majority of the population.
You are absolutely right. I was forced out of my last job due to a medical disability. I would gladly go right back to work at severely reduced salary, if I could tolerate being around people with their perfumes and fragrance chemicals. (Even laundry soap fragrances flare up my MCS and keeps me sick for days.) SSDI doesn't pay much, and I'm lucky that my wife has a decent manufacturing job with benefits.

According to the right-wing narrative, I'm a slacker riding on "entitlements" that I have paid for since I was 14. Since I'm 61 and in shaky health, it's not likely that I will ever consume more than a modest fraction of all the money that I paid in.
 
  • #12
Greg Bernhardt said:
Russ the study in the first post has evidence that people generally don't behave that way.
The way I read the article, none of the people involved had jobs to begin with and they were homeless, not just poor. Not the same as what you are suggesting.

From an economics perspective, quitting your job if the government will pay you the difference up to the poverty rate is actually the CORRECT action because such a program effectively causes every below poverty pay rate to equal zero, making people work for free.

Besides which, I doubt many people don't know anyone who has taken advantage of similar, but less drastic programs. One friend of mine once made no effort to find a job for months because unemployment compensation enabled it. Another calculated the effective pay rate of a job and turned down an offer because it didn't pay enough over unemployment.
 
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  • #13
I hate to toss in facts, because that just enrages both sides, but the total amount of money required to lift all individuals in the US above the poverty line via direct aid (i.e. you get a check for the difference between the poverty level and what you made) is $1.4T additional (i.e. over and above the $1.3T Pythagorean calls 'doing nothing') per year.

This is from the latest tables from the US census, ignoring AK and HI's higher poverty line (which can only increase this number), counting individuals, not families or households.

I fully admit this is a simple model - anyone who criticizes it on that basis is free to do the work on a more complicated one and post it here.

To put this in context, $1.4T is twice what the Department of Defense gets. It is more than the entire discretionary budget (i.e. all cabinet agencies). It is a third again as large as the deficit, and if it were to be funded out of income tax, the rates would have to increase to 2.4x what they are today.

I have not calculated the effect of this on the putative recipients, but it could be substantial: people just at the poverty line would be taxed at the rate of someone making $400,000 a year after this change.
 
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  • #14
Thanks for the data v50. I think we should stick strictly to homelessness as that was the study. My fault if I started to go off course.
 
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  • #15
Are you sure about that, V50? Back of the envelope, the US ave household size is 3, the US population is 310 million and the poverty rate 16% at $20k/yr. Assuming assistance of half required to get above poverty would equal $165 B / yr.
 
  • #16
The numbers are available on the census website. I used individuals, not households, so a stay-at-home parent would be considered poor. Also, there is a big spike at $2500/year or less. Almost 100 million people. You might argue that many of these aren't really poor, and I might even agree with you - it shows the confusion between income and wealth I've complained about before. But if you want to end poverty by redistributive taxation, you are going to have a hard time distinguishing between Sue, who is a stay at home mom by choice, and Mary, who would leave her abusive husband and take the kids with her, if only she had an income of her own.

My larger point, though, is that this question started out as a 3000 GBP one-time payment to help the homeless, and immediately blossomed into massive wealth distribution to end poverty. Perhaps it would be valuable to see how this works out for the smaller problem before rolling it out countrywide and making its funding mandatory.

All homeless people are poor, but not all poor people are homeless. That suggests two different approaches to the problem: one is to look at the factors the distinguish the non-homeless poor from the homeless poor and work on those, and the other is to attack the poverty. Up to now, most activities have focused on the former, although some events (O'Connor v. Donaldson) have inadvertently pushed in the other direction. This is an interesting experiment - 3000 GBP won't make the difference between poor and not-poor on its face, but maybe for some fraction of the homeless population it will be enough.
 
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  • #17
Vanadium 50 said:
Perhaps it would be valuable to see how this works out for the smaller problem before rolling it out countrywide and making its funding mandatory.

Exactly. This is a constructive and imaginative experiment which should be followed through. I don’t believe any of those extrapolations of total cost to solve the country’s poverty problem. The initial sample was too small to be representative and I wouldn’t give the reporting of results to social workers either.

Just expand the experiment gradually and see what happens. It would be necessary to carefully define how to calculate the cost/benefit in advance and to have a firm of auditors keep close tabs on the experiment and report the financial results regularly. Otherwise you are surely going to get all sorts of cheating.

.
 
  • #18
I think one should be careful not to lump the homeless population in western countries in the same boat as those living in poverty in African villages.

In the first article, "Why we should give free money to everyone", the correspondent remarks on the great differences made in the lives of recipients of modest grants, which recipients are reportedly impoverished but apparently otherwise unimpaired physically or mentally. In the cases of these recipients in Africa, the granted funds were used with great alacrity because these individuals knew what they wanted to do with the funds to attempt to better their lives. This particular approach works with worthy individuals who, due to unfortunate circumstance, do not have the funds available to better their lives. Similar programs, like microloans from the Grameen Foundation, have proved effective in providing impoverished but motivated individuals with the tools to help them escape their poverty. The grants worked in Kenya and Uganda because the recipients there needed funds to continue their education or train to acquire a skill which they could use to provide for their well-being.

There are a variety of reasons why individuals wind up homeless in the US and other countries in the west. Mental disease and substance abuse are but two documented causes for homelessness, and I think that a blanket grant of 3000 pounds or $5000 per individual would do them a grave disservice if they are not capable of using the money effectively. It would be little better than dumping a pile of money in the street and stepping back to watch the free-for-all which would ensue.

Would such a program help get some homeless get off the streets of the US and other countries? Undoubtedly. But government programs have a nasty habit of becoming 'one size fits all' programs, where little attention is paid to diagnosing why someone may be on the street. Instead, you create another income redistribution scheme with little accountability for its effectiveness in solving the problems which originally brought about the program.

The problem with government spending these days isn't that it's too stingy, it's that it is so lavish that no distinction is made between the spending which is paid for through reasonable taxation and the spending which is paid for by borrowing the money from someone else. The 'someone else' usually expects to get paid back sometime.
 
  • #19
I wonder how cost effective having a social worker judge case by case would be.
 
  • #20
That's what social workers are supposed to do already.

Look, if you start giving homeless people thousands of dollars or pounds sterling in a lump sum, you put their safety in jeopardy because then they can be preyed on by less scrupulous people who don't have the best interest of the homeless at heart. Drug dealers and muggers like money, too, and they don't particularly care from whom they get it.
 
  • #21
Pythagorean said:
I wonder how cost effective having a social worker judge case by case would be.

SteamKing said:
That's what social workers are supposed to do already.

I don't know about the US, but in the UK social workers are generally regarded as incompetent meddlers with not much interest in anything except their own wage packets. Their main argument in their own defense is that they are ridiculously overworked. if you read the jrf summary article, it seems clear one of the reasons this was a success was the different and style of support given.

I can confirm the idiocy of the UK soclal worker "system" form personal experience. Two family members (one old, the other very old) were living together in their own house. They had enough income to live on, but not much savings except for the value of the house.

The very old one suffered a sudden illness which required 24 hour nursing care for the indefinite future. The social work "solution" proposed was:

1. Move the patient into a privately run care home.
2. Since there was no cash available to pay the care home fees, make a compulsory purchase of the house.
3. Declare the other occupant of the house homeless, and arrange some other accommodation, e.g. a bed-and-breakfast hostel.

That brilliant plan didn't go far after paying a solicitor to tell them what they could do with it... but without somebody to organize that, it would have happened. End result, the "system" would have got the value of a house, to pay for about 6 weeks care and a funeral, and somebody else would have spent the rest of their life (which turned out to be about 30 years) without their own roof over their head.

if you want to save money on social care, start by getting rid of the fools like that in the system. Just dumping their wages in the streets for people to fight over couldn't be any worse, IMO.
 
  • #22
I think there are some simplistic assumptions made in the first article referenced.

The author made, IMO, an unjustified extrapolation from the results of making small grants to healthy African villagers to the more complex and totally dissimilar circumstances of the urban homeless populations of western nations. This extrapolation is also reinforced by the notion, which is common in western societies, that complex social problems can be fixed if only X amount of money is appropriated and spent. No heavy lifting, no deep thinking need be applied to the situation, just hand out some cash. Time and again, it has been demonstrated that if the victims of undesirable behavior are subsidized by the state or whomever, you get more of the undesirable behavior, not less. To be sure, the intent may be to alleviate the suffering caused by the undesirable behavior, but oftentimes, the victims only see that a certain amount of money is available, and concentrate on obtaining the cash rather than altering their behavior to obtain a better life. If you've dropped out of high school, for instance, there is no requirement that you finish your education in order to continue to receive benefits. If you receive welfare benefits, up until the system was reformed in the 1990s, there was no requirement that you spend time in job training or looking for work; the benefits continued if you did nought to improve yourself or your circumstances.

Now, it is certainly true that there are a lot of time servers and time wasters who are employed at government jobs, who would ordinarily get the sack for their mendacity or incompetence if employed in the private sector. Certainly, this part of government employment should see some reform (and is long overdue for it) and I understand that politicians are very reluctant to tangle with the civil service establishment in various countries. But, with regard to the immediate question of providing help to the homeless, government functionaries need not have a monopoly on providing an assessment of an individual's capability of managing his affairs. Certainly, there is enough need in this area which perhaps could be filled partially by private charitable foundations or other interested parties. The point is, if such a program to help the homeless is not carefully designed and administered, the cash distribution just becomes another dole, and it would be remarkable if conditions improved without making some alteration in how the problem of homelessness is treated by national and local governments.

I think a glimpse into how people (who otherwise might be gainfully employed and comfortably housed) react when receiving a sudden windfall is to examine what happens long-term to winners of the various lotteries one finds nowadays in many countries. It seems a rather large number of winners who receive payouts which are sizable compared to the winner's net worth before hitting the jackpot wind up in worse circumstances than if they had never won. Receiving a large sum of money all at once serves to adversely affect the judgment of a certain number of winners, who take their good fortune and splurge on fancy cars or an expensive house and soon wind up bankrupt or worse. Once the money's gone, their lives have been altered, but not necessarily for the better. I fear that's what would happen if we assume that the homeless are just like everyone else and plunk a few thousand quid or a couple of grand in their laps and then abandon them again to their fate.
 
  • #23
Pythagorean said:
I wonder how cost effective having a social worker judge case by case would be.

My proposal would be to set up a pilot program with generous funding of a good few millions, with the purpose of finding out whether a system of cash handouts works and in what sense it works and with what results. Probably you have to conduct several experiments with different conditions in order to find out how it works best.

You can’t do that without social workers on the ground. They should be represented in the administration of the project, but the higher echelons have to include a lot of other experts such as economists, lawyers, psychologists, etc.

When we have the promise of at least reducing the problem of poverty as indicated in the articles quoted, we have to follow it up. If the pilot program confirms the benefits versus costs, it should be expanded.

We cannot afford to waste people’s lives when society has invested so much already, without trying new solutions. We should not write people off because it looks like they have no value. Some poor people have a lot of potential value. It’s like your car doesn’t start, so you scrap it and use a taxi service. No, you ask the garage to propose a solution which doesn’t cost too much.

.
 
  • #24
This is a pilot project initiated by the Canadian Goverment in 2009 and ending spring 2013, for 5 major cities.
It is called At Home/Chez Soi with a Housing First approach to the homeless.
http://www.mentalhealthcommission.ca/English/Pages/homelessness.aspx?routetoken=e7a061bb6973545c243f3c8531a8f8db&terminitial=23 [Broken]

A brief of what they found midway,
Giving people who are homeless the power of choice
To many community groups in Montréal, the answer to the city’s homelessness problem is to provide more social/congregate housing. However, due to limited availability of social housing sites across Montréal, the At Home/Chez Soi team was forced to take a broader approach. Rather than randomly assigning participants to either social housing (to the extent it could be found) or subsidized, private-market apartments, it was decided to give all participants the ability to choose the type of housing in which they wanted to live. In the end, fewer than five per cent of participants elected to be placed in social housing. Regardless of which option they chose, all participants were visited by program staff regularly and given access to the same kinds of services, including health care and life skills coaching.

What We've Learned
Preliminary results of the Montréal At Home/Chez Soi study show that the Housing First approach is feasible, effective and cost-effective. After being provided with housing, study participants were found to spend less time in shelters, jails and hospitals—and at a cost per person that is not much more than traditional interventions.

Providing employment services to people who have experienced homelessness with moderate mental health needs has also been effective. However, the IPS model has proven more difficult to apply to the homeless population than to the general population for a number of reasons including: substance abuse problems, criminal records and issues with motivation that can make it difficult to hold down a job. Still, the team’s work in this area is providing important findings into what works and what doesn’t for this specific population, which will lead to more effective vocational support programs in the future.

The program has been transferred to the provinces and/or cities, some of which may or may not continue the program, even if impressed by the outcome. In Montreal the choice has been to revert back to the old ways of doing things, and extrapolation as to the why would be just a guess since the explanation given by authoitiies was kind of vague ( the ending and transfer of the program had a newspaper report several months back.)

While within the program, the participants, even if poor, at least had a roof over their head and a place to call home.


So is old ways of thinking about the homeless that needs to be changed before
 
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  • #25
AlephZero said:
The very old one suffered a sudden illness which required 24 hour nursing care for the indefinite future. The social work "solution" proposed was:

1. Move the patient into a privately run care home.
2. Since there was no cash available to pay the care home fees, make a compulsory purchase of the house.
3. Declare the other occupant of the house homeless, and arrange some other accommodation, e.g. a bed-and-breakfast hostel.

Unfortunately, that is the mind set in not just a few jurisdictions and most likely not a worker's fault. Compassion and common sense might not be a standard upon which their review is based.

The worker has guidlines to follow, and one of the first would be to check upon assests of the "client", and it would seem expropriate said assets, without validating any input from the client or concerned parties, and then to tell the 'client' the system will take care of you, even if that means putting you out on the street due to lack of public funds to follow up on the taking care of.
So, no, scare stories like that are not as rare as one would like to think.
 
  • #26
I think homelessness and poverty is due to what's lacking in people's heads, not what's lacking in their bank accounts. Some people will always be broke no matter how much money they make. I know people like that. Giving cash to the homeless is like throwing money down the drain. If those people knew how to handle money, they most likely wouldn't be homeless in the first place.
 
  • #27
leroyjenkens said:
I think homelessness and poverty is due to what's lacking in people's heads, not what's lacking in their bank accounts. Some people will always be broke no matter how much money they make. I know people like that. Giving cash to the homeless is like throwing money down the drain. If those people knew how to handle money, they most likely wouldn't be homeless in the first place.

In my experience, these kind of debates always degenerate into people swapping anecdotes about what they believe human nature is.

i.e. 'some people are just too stupid to ever do well.'

For what it's worth, Leroy, I think you're overly pessimistic about that.
 
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  • #28
The idea of giving money to the poor without strings has been around since Milton Friedman's version via the negative income tax proposal (discussed here 1968 in WFB's Firing Line), at least. The concept has some serious evidence in support, surfacing here again in the OP references.

The problem lies with the following. As the idea hinges on giving responsibility back to the recipients in place of government staff and regulation, the income allotted must be the *only* government largess. That is, if the weekly income goes to the horse track or the like instead of to meals and to clothing, the only resort becomes family, neighbors and private charity. No food stamps, no government housing, etc. Politicians, government employees, and the electorate have not been willing to let go.

Without such a sweeping change, another $175 billion atop the existing welfare budget must have little chance of improving the lot of the poor given the $15-20 trillion already spent on the War on Poverty since Lyndon Johnson's time.
 
  • #29
leroyjenkens said:
I think homelessness and poverty is due to what's lacking in people's heads, not what's lacking in their bank accounts. Some people will always be broke no matter how much money they make. I know people like that. Giving cash to the homeless is like throwing money down the drain. If those people knew how to handle money, they most likely wouldn't be homeless in the first place.
I'm quoting this post because it comes closest to describing the current situation in the US. I have little current experience, but about 20 years ago I was one member of the Nashua Area Shelter Committee. Nashua is the second largest city in New Hampshire - about 85,000 people.

There are two type of homeless shelters. The first is used by people suddenly find themselves and perhaps their families without a home. Examples would include the loss of a home perhaps by fire or some other change such as relocation to the city for a new job. In this case a room in a shelter is available for anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks while more permanent arrangements are made. Although these make up a major portion of the homelessness population, they are not what most people think of as "homeless".

The seconds type of shelter is the "drop-in" shelter. Nashua does not have one of these. Where these shelters are available, the overnight visitors get a cot. And there are rules regarding alcohol, arrival times, etc. On the coldest nights, there are more visitors than at other times. Some of the chronically homeless take advantage of these shelters. Some never do.

When I was active, one of the limitation in NH on receiving "welfare benefits" was a checking account balance of $3000. This resulted in many homeless people with checking accounts that had exactly $3000 - checking accounts that they never used.

That amount doesn't sound terribly different that the 3000 pound grants offered in the program described in decorrespondent.

The real concern is not whether homeless people are too lazy. If they were lazy, they wouldn't be homeless. The problem comes with everyone else. Shouldn't there be an advantage to contributing to the economy. Some say not - and they are carrying the day. There is a "Work versus Welfare" trade-off analysis that is done each year. Here is a link for the 2013 report:

object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/the_work_versus_welfare_trade-off_2013_wp.pdf

You can look up your state, but in New Hampshire, half of the citizens would be as well off or better off by dropping out of the workforce.
 
  • #30
Just as bonds are rated by the creditworthiness of the issuer, I think the £3000 disbursement should be rated by the likeliness that it will enable the homeless recipient to "succeed", which I presume would look something like having a place to stay, clean clothes, enough food and the ability to seek/begin a job.

It shouldn't take more than a few mi££ion to run enough trials in enough different settings and with enough permutations to get a hazy picture of how people fare 10-20 years after receiving their free money. Even though it's likely that most recipients might remain homeless, if only a small fraction go on to have jobs which contribute "£nough" to the GDP, then even to conservatives it should look like a safe (i.e. already paid for) investment. They probably would stay in poverty, but to paraphrase a previous poster, that would mean just be poverty rather than poverty and homelessness (which is a modest improvement).

I guess I'm saying that if even a few people cease being homeless, it pays for itself, and at the very least those who remain homeless can now afford a tent, some decently warm clothes, food, alcohol (yes alcohol, because being homeless sucks) and whatever else they might want. Those who remain homeless are not, however, to be considered wasted investments or failures for the following reason: homelessness causes all manner of what I can only characterize as psychiatric injury. One of the most injurious of these is a loss of environmental control. Being able to spend money, I think, would restore some sense of environmental control (if ephemerally) which I believe is Very Important. I feel this is Very Important because: the less psychiatric injury that homeless people have to suffer while homeless, the less time it will take for them to adjust to a new life should it ever be available to / possible for them.

From a humanitarian standpoint, the concept of homelessness is revolting, but I specifically structured my argument so it would appeal to the conservative "why should I give them my money" mentality rather than a "isn't homelessness tragic" mentality.
 
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  • #31
One percent of US population is homeless, as compared to the 0.1% homeless rate in Denmark. Maybe ask the Danes what they are doing right?

http://www.english.umd.edu/interpolations/3466
 
  • #32
mal4mac said:
One percent of US population is homeless, as compared to the 0.1% homeless rate in Denmark. Maybe ask the Danes what they are doing right?

http://www.english.umd.edu/interpolations/3466

I'm skeptical of those figures from a student essay?
 
  • #33
mheslep said:
I'm skeptical of those figures from a student essay?

There are references given for both numbers. If you want to be skeptical of the original sources, that's a different issue from just dismissing it as a "student essay".
 
  • #34
AlephZero said:
There are references given for both numbers. If you want to be skeptical of the original sources, that's a different issue from just dismissing it as a "student essay".

We're not given the original sources by the poster, just assertions of figures as fact which are misused in the comparison.
 
  • #35
Vanadium 50 said:
For example, the EU definition of poverty is earning less than 60% of the median income. A definition like that virtually ensures that poverty will never be eliminated.
I really don't get your point. Based on some absolute definition like e.g. earning less than 1 Dollar a day, poor people in the EU would not only be poor but starving as prices are somehow proportional to the median income which is much higher in the EU than worldwide.
 
<h2>What is the rationale behind giving free money to the homeless?</h2><p>The rationale behind giving free money to the homeless is to provide them with immediate financial assistance to help meet their basic needs. This can include food, shelter, and other necessities that can improve their quality of life.</p><h2>Will giving free money to the homeless solve the issue of homelessness?</h2><p>While giving free money to the homeless can provide temporary relief, it is not a long-term solution to the issue of homelessness. It is important to address the root causes of homelessness, such as lack of affordable housing and mental health issues, in order to effectively reduce homelessness.</p><h2>How can we ensure that the free money given to the homeless is used for its intended purpose?</h2><p>One way to ensure that the free money given to the homeless is used for its intended purpose is to partner with local organizations that provide support and resources to the homeless population. These organizations can help monitor and guide the use of the funds to ensure they are being used for essential needs.</p><h2>What are the potential drawbacks of giving free money to the homeless?</h2><p>One potential drawback of giving free money to the homeless is that it may perpetuate a cycle of dependency and discourage individuals from seeking long-term solutions to their homelessness. It is important to pair financial assistance with other resources and support to help individuals become self-sufficient.</p><h2>Are there any successful examples of giving free money to the homeless?</h2><p>Yes, there have been successful examples of giving free money to the homeless, such as the Housing First approach in Utah. This approach provides homeless individuals with permanent housing and financial assistance, resulting in a significant decrease in homelessness in the state.</p>

What is the rationale behind giving free money to the homeless?

The rationale behind giving free money to the homeless is to provide them with immediate financial assistance to help meet their basic needs. This can include food, shelter, and other necessities that can improve their quality of life.

Will giving free money to the homeless solve the issue of homelessness?

While giving free money to the homeless can provide temporary relief, it is not a long-term solution to the issue of homelessness. It is important to address the root causes of homelessness, such as lack of affordable housing and mental health issues, in order to effectively reduce homelessness.

How can we ensure that the free money given to the homeless is used for its intended purpose?

One way to ensure that the free money given to the homeless is used for its intended purpose is to partner with local organizations that provide support and resources to the homeless population. These organizations can help monitor and guide the use of the funds to ensure they are being used for essential needs.

What are the potential drawbacks of giving free money to the homeless?

One potential drawback of giving free money to the homeless is that it may perpetuate a cycle of dependency and discourage individuals from seeking long-term solutions to their homelessness. It is important to pair financial assistance with other resources and support to help individuals become self-sufficient.

Are there any successful examples of giving free money to the homeless?

Yes, there have been successful examples of giving free money to the homeless, such as the Housing First approach in Utah. This approach provides homeless individuals with permanent housing and financial assistance, resulting in a significant decrease in homelessness in the state.

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