(Oh, and giving homeless people homes is MUCH cheaper than treating homelessness as a crime)
In a similar vein, the Foundations for Social Change's New Leaf Project tried simply giving homeless people money (CAD7500). If the right is correct and homelessness is a moral failing, then this should make everything worse ("they'll just blow it on drugs").
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The results are definitive: 18 months on, grant recipients found housing a year earlier than the control group; 70% experienced less food insecurity. Money went to food, clothes and rent, with a 39% decline in spending on booze, drugs and cigarettes.
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The randomized, controlled study had 115 subjects aged 19-64, all of whom had experienced homelessness for at least six months. On average, they saved CAD1000 of the initial grant over the 12-month study. Participants spent more on their kids and other family members.
The participants' 12-month, $7500 cash grants amounted to less than half of what it costs to billet a person in a homeless shelter over the same period.
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This is both amazing and obvious. The best cure for homelessness is a home. The best cure for poverty is money.
It's a very powerful argument for a basic income, too.
But not necessarily for a *universal* basic income.
Here's the problem with UBI: imagine two people, one of whom is in the 10% or 1% or 0.1% and has all their needs met every month; the other person does not.
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Give each of them $1000/month. The poor person experiences a huge difference in their life: they go from not having their needs met - that is, not having a home or food or utilities - to having them met. This is transformative.
What about the rich person? Well, they put the money in a 401(k) or other tax-advantaged savings.
Fast forward a decade.
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10 years later, the poor person still has their needs met. They have better health outcomes, their kids have better educational outcomes. *Success!*
The rich person, meanwhile, is *a quarter million dollars richer*, thanks to the miracle of compound interest.
We have reduced one of the worst aspects of inequality, but inequality itself remains intact, along with all the toxic, corrosive problems it creates.
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Means-testing is humiliating and cruel. Universal services promote solidarity. Means-tested services are a form of Apartheid.
Imagine if you had to prove your poverty before you could go to a public library, or let your kid play in a public park or attend a public school.
But public parks, schools and libraries are a subsidy to the wealthy. We could insist they use country clubs, private schools and subscription libraries instead.
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It's easy to understand how this ends: wealthy people use their political power to defund the public sphere.
The money they'd lose by having to pay for country clubs and private schools wouldn't reduce their spending power enough to prevent them from accumulating outsized political power.
To do that, we need to tax them.
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All the money in circulation is money the government has spent, but hasn't taxed out of existence All the money you and I have to spend is the government's deficit. If governments don't run deficits (if they taxed as much as they spent), there'd be nothing left for us!
Federal taxes don't pay for programs, but they DO something important. They keep rich people from getting too rich - getting so rich that they can distort our political process.
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Likewise other progressive, universal programs like a Federal Job Guarantee, which would set a TRUE minimum wage - the wage every person who wants to work is guaranteed, irrespective of whether anyone in the private sector wants their labor.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/22/jobs-guarantee/#job-guarantee
Without such a guarantee, the true minimum wage is $0 - the price your labor fetches if no one in the private sector has a job for you.
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Such universal programs must be complements to social programs like direct transfers, disability benefits, etc, not replacements for them.
When the current crisis is over we're going to face a massive unemployment and homelessness crisis. The private sector won't be able to solve it. The right's version of fixing this is workfare: Build Trump's wall or starve.
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We need a powerful progressive alternative: grounded in caring, universality, and repairing the Earth. Direct transfers, housing first, and a jobs guarantee are policies that work:
* Need money? Here's money.
* Need a home? Here's a home.
* Need a job? Here's a job.
If those sound expensive to you, consider the unbearable cost of mass poverty, homlessness and unemployment.
Image:
Grendelkhan
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homeless_encampment_near_I-580_onramp_in_Oakland.jpg
CC BY-SA
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
eof/
@pluralistic Excellent thread, mostly annoys the heck out of me because you're wrapping up and bowing ideas I've been kicking around for a decade and more, betteer than I've been able to: #homelessness #MMT, #MoralisingPathology, #AssetInflation, #wealth, #poverty, #inequality, #WealthTax, #LVT, #capitalism, #postcapitalism, and more.
I'm going to amplify and extend a bit, you and readers may find this useful.
I'm going to break this out by themes.
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@pluralistic #MoralisingPathology is the practice of treating some dysfunction as a moral failing.
It's why the Western US has been on fire:
Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian forestry official who married an American, came to the United States in 1876, and was soon naturalized. He headed the Bureau of Forestry, which was a small agency in the Department of Agriculture. ... [In Europe] fire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals." Well, that’s a great phrase. But it was totally inappropriate.
“California Is Built To Burn”"
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@pluralistic my admin @woozle brought up that a significant chunk of this is brought about by enclosure of land:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
@eryn @pluralistic ...with the main obstacle to implementation, at this point, being that the Right isn't interested in what works but rather in defending their cliquian beliefs at any cost. "Evidence" is, at best, a thing to be cherry-picked for the pieces they like. "Group cohesion" is their prime goal, not reducing misery.
Figuring out how to get past that mindset is a nontrivial problem, and leads to a much larger and more fraught discussion about the merits of democracy, as an ideal and in practice.
@pluralistic This is the basis of MMT right?
@pettter Yes, it is.
@pluralistic but of course, who are the government ultimately building said roads in aid of
@pluralistic [citation needed]
@pluralistic means-testing is also a huge workload for the recipient.
So this experiment isn't just a test of the best way to address homelessness; it's also a test of whether the right's frame of homelessness as an individual failing is correct, or whether the left's conception of homelessness as a system problem is right.
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