Homeless, But Enjoying Hawaii On $3 A Day
npr.org
npr.org
2. As a secondary note, while welfare is unfortunate, what is more unfortunate is that we spend more money on murderers than those with mental illnesses roaming our streets. It is a twisted system where doing a crime towards society is given more monetary reward than simply not being able to fit in.
Now add to that the fact that you'd be taking work away from other folks who want to get paid to do it (cf: internships).
This can be said for many things Singapore does. Its quite possible these type of social services simply do not scale well and it would be best if local governments "owned" these problems as they do sewage, water, fire department, etc... But in a multi-tier government: local, state, federal, you can most always kick the problem up a level.
2. It is unfortunate that we seem willing to spend more money punishing the criminally insane than we do helping nonviolent folk with mental illness, who make up much of our homeless population.
For 5% of your start-up we fund you with a laptop and $273. It's not much, but it's enough.
It will cover your room and board and full health care benefits for 91 days. No more ramen (like other programs); eat delicious chopped beef steak with vegetables, mashed potatoes, bread, a fresh apple and cake. Demo day on the beach. Apply now!
You could do a series of those based on country stereo types.
The Dutch version:
IJ-Combinator, for 5% of your start-up we fund you with hijacked wifi on a laptop stolen from a parked car and E 19 per day. This lets you eat and sleep at the local Salvation Army. Free drugs on Friday, demo day in the vondelpark under the bridge at midnight. Be sure to bring your own cardboard box.
Meanwhile, Hawaiian taxpayers face a $1.2 billion budget
deficit, which is being addressed in part with deferred
state tax refunds and deferred Medicaid reimbursements.
For any tourist destination, a sales tax is beautiful, because you get to tax people who don't live there. There is a danger that given two tourist destinations of equal attractiveness, the one without the sales tax may draw more tourists, but this isn't a problem for Hawaii. Where are you going to go, if you want beaches and sun and live on the west coast? Hawaii or Mexico, and there's a lot of people who go to Hawaii that wouldn't be comfortable with Mexico, so it's off the table. For Hawaii to tax their own people but not tourists seems like a strategically poor move.
A homeless program that cost $2M was not nearly as interesting to me as the fact they, of all states, had a budget deficit.
They also have a hotel tax and a rental car tax.
Again, Hawaii is taxing it's own people, instead of it's tourists. In self-defense, many of those businesses pass that tax on to the tourists and itemize it on their receipts, but many don't.
The impact of this excise tax is exactly the same as a sales tax.
And thus in a nutshell describes the moral hazard of such programs. It's just another situation of balancing a program for those in truly in need and those trying to take advantage of the system. Very difficult to define boundaries.
Overall, I'd guess there are probably more salaried freeloaders than homeless freeloaders, and they make a lot more! There are places where you could do pretty much nothing in the bowels of some huge firm for 5 years and nobody would notice. And it's even easier if you do at least some work; I know plenty of people with office jobs who probably average 5 hours a week of genuine work. Of course, you might ask why homeless people don't just go get those cushy office jobs, which is an interesting/complicated question (they aren't really jobs you can apply for directly, are usually only available past a certain level of formal credential, require good bluffing, and require a certain amount of formal reliability, like showing up to work on time [even if you don't do anything there]).
"I recycle here," he says. "I make money doing that." Some days, over $40, he says. </snip>
So, he collects roughly 800 recyclables a day to earn an average of $40/day. He obviously uses some of that $40 in the local economy as his social services are only costing him $3/day. He receives: "And he sleeps at the IHS shelter for $3 a day, with three free meals, $200 worth of food stamps and the state's free health care program." I'm assuming the $200 in food stamps are per month.
Perhaps this system, at least for this anecdote, is optimized. Could the state have state employees with all employee benefits doing collections of recyclables for this amount? Could the state manage a prisoner work program to collect recyclables for less? Is this homeless person taking money from someone else in the local economy that otherwise would have collected the recyclables?
If Gary is collecting 800 improperly disposed containers (i.e. litter) per day, the argument the state is getting a good deal is valid. But I suspect the vast majority of the containers were fished out of trash recepticles. The marginal cost to the state of hauling recyclables from a trash bin to the land-fill, and the marginal cost of adding to the land-fill has got to be way below $.05. So I suspect it is not such a good deal for the state.
I'm all for universal health coverage and making sure that people who can't find work can get support, but this is why piecemeal solutions don't work. It needs to be national.
You are right that people who don't have that kind of barrier should, and mostly do get back into society after a period of hard times. The chronic ones are homeless for a reason, and it's pretty insensitive to just say that they should live "pro-actively".
Sorry. Couldn't help it :P I love Python, but there seems to be less commercial demand for it than almost any other language.
- divorce
- protracted illness
- market conditions beyond your control
- mental problems