[galimalint]

In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.

It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.

[bombcar]

So shipping homeless from SF to Australia and paying $100k/yr per would be a win/win?

[typewithrhythm]

I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...

[teaearlgraycold]

I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.

[ltbarcly3]

Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?

[teaearlgraycold]

I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to hear your insights.

[johnnyanmac]

I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also politically heated to give more funding because people are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice their mental health to avoid the issue.

I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.

[ltbarcly3]

It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to.

Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?

[teaearlgraycold]

“They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services.

As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.

It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.

Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.

I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.

[SoftTalker]

Or a George Carlin fan

[teaearlgraycold]

Definitely a Carlin fan. I don't think how he does on everything, but his way of viewing the world is valid.

[SoftTalker]

IMO he went overboard on the cynicism in his later years but he was always funny.