How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

And therein lies the problem. You can hire 10,000 "regular Joe" agents to go after "regular Joe" offenders and make far less than if you could somehow successfully hire 100 genius agents to go after the top 100 suspected cases.

The issue lies in the fact that most people simply are not capable of going toe to toe with some of the best legal tax frameworks money can buy, and so like with all law enforcement the "hard" targets tend to get largely ignored while the soft targets are exploited mercilessly.

That's all I see an IRS hiring program doing - bringing the hammer down on people for rather trivial things, while continuing to ignore the elephant in the room simply due human nature being what it is. They want to show wins, not 6 years on the same 3 billion dollar case.

This is the crux, and I've never seen a good Libertarian defense against this. Someone will always fill the power void.

That depends a lot on your definition of "wealthy" and "regular joes".

https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...

According to that, the top 1% contributes about 37% of income taxes. On the other hand, the bottom 50% contributes only 2.78%.

I guess a lot of people would consider the 1% to be wealthy, but most of the 1% are actually just doctors. I'm guessing that the real wealthy, those whose income is derived from capital rather than their labour, don't contribute much to federal tax income because of the low capital gains tax rate in the US.

It gives people an option to "exit" shitty societies.

Unfortunately you'll find a good portion being spent on 20th century drugs, which suck immensely.

But if the people in power are willing to take that risk, then it might be a positive thing.

One glaring flaw is that humans are a social species and calculate rank and favors and grudges almost autonomously. Receiving your "life" from a government stooge is something of an embarrassment to men who've survived cold winters and starvation and dehydration. We like to be "equal" or "respectful" to a gift giver by having the possibility of giving back an equivalent gift.

So in a sense, you have to teach the homeless person abilities which, eventually, allow him/her to reciprocate a gift. Even if the gift was from the government.

I think a more likely scenario is companies will pop up who cater to providing the needs of UBI dependents. Think about it, if UBI is enough to cover home and food then you could package these together. Welcome to extended stay from hell.

Lets be real, UBI might protect you from going homeless but that ain't the same as having mobility and choice. With more people participating in the market for housing its going to get tight for awhile and you could end up with more sprawl.

Provided there are no location/COL adjustments.

Whether that's too high or too low is a separate discussion. But saying we're at 38% just isn't true.

The primary impact has been massive reduction in the ability of the state government to provide services, including education. That is too long-term to be immediately measurable.

This is a very practical difference. For the sake of easy math, let's assume that the maximum-revenue point on the curve is a 50% tax rate. It then follows that for every % you charge someone over 50%, tax revenue decreases. Which means that at this rate, every additional X% of tax is actually decreasing total economic output by 2X%! And assuming that we're on a smooth curve, that means that every X% you DECREASE your tax from the Laffer point is creating 2X% of economic value. Now, based on how fairly the created value is distributed and how efficiently you believe the government can spend its tax revenue you may have a different opinion on how much value you're comfortable destroying to increase tax revenue, but I'd submit that 2X is quite a high number.

I believe we need much-higher-than-0 taxes, but "we're still below the Laffer point" is a poor argument for raising them.

There are plenty of examples of politicians making promises of spending now on others in order to gain cost savings down the road. Obamacare was sold to the all-too-eager masses this way. Especially at the county/local level, such cost savings arguments could be made very effectively if there were convincing numbers to back them up. You could also make arguments that public health and land values could benefit from such spending. I'm basically sold purely on a public health argument.

What I take issue with is your abstract line of thinking. First, those who oppose you may not be as shallow (nor ignorant) as you seem to suggest. For example, I would love to see temporary housing, drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job/life-skills counseling to be setup for the homeless. But my local government is so disconnected from reality and are so wholly lacking in priorities that there would never be enough political will to allocate additional budget enough to truly address the problem. So, I oppose you on budget priorities grounds: politicians need to make eliminating homelessness a priority at the expense of some other program - and they could care less about the homeless. The taxes are already too high, and there's a laundry list of bullcrap that the city and county does that could be cut in favor of actually helping those who are in real dire straits.

Second, the environment into which the homeless enter is not a vacuum, and at least local to me, the government had a big hand in creating the current homeless crisis we see (legalized building structures for public overnight camping in the streets.) Coupled with our generous social services that keep people alive, our already bad homelessness problem has metastasized into real human tragedy. So, while I am pained to see what's going on here, I am also deeply skeptical that there is enough wisdom in my local officials to deal with this problem when they were fools at the start and caused it to flare so badly. I oppose you in your thinking that government is capable of solving this problem.

Third, the opinion that additional public services for the homeless become an incentive to remain homeless is a legitimate one regardless of how crisis/fear-minded you are on the subject. The crux of my argument is that dependency robs people of their liberty. The systems we have today for supporting the homeless create dependency and are unjust for that reason. I am in favor of increasing services, housing, and even outright paying people who are homeless to get them out of their situation -- BUT, to get around the dependency issue, there needs to be mandatory work. We need to create a more comfortable life for these people and provide a real possibility to emerge and be self-sustaining. And, at the same time, it has to be UNcomfortable because we expect work out of them. I oppose pure charity to otherwise able-bodied people if that charity will keep those people in their miserable place.

If I were el presidente benevolent dictator, I would make homelessness illegal tomorrow. Along with housing, counseling, and rehab, I would give people who break my law a choice of a few kinds of make-work while they sort their lives out. If they are intractable or fail to show up for their new job, they get sent to the work farm (essentially forced work prison where they get paid real wages) or the military if they are fit enough. For people unable/too sick or those not in their right mind, I would reserve the biggest cash outlays in order to provide comprehensive care for them.

That does not mean the US has the highest quality healthcare in terms of health outcomes for the population.

If anyone reading this believes we (the US) have the highest quality health outcomes, please do some research with an open mind. We're not terrible, just far worse than you'd expect given our wealth. We are actually great in some cases, e.g., certain types of cancer treatment (I think, don't have stats at hand). But in many, many categories, our outcomes are middle of the pack or towards the bottom for developed countries. For example, IIRC, we're quite middling/mediocre in life expectancy, infant mortality, heart attack mortality, % of diabetics with managed care, efficiency of spend, etc.

Reducing the over-all cost isn't necessarily the only goal. One goal could also be to have the highest quality care in the world, which we have today.

>Single-payer coverage doesn't necessarily dry up the market for private insurance, either.

Comparing the private insurance industry in the US and Canada or UK is laughable. The fact that it exists is not the same as saying it isn't dried up.

Go do a google search for something like "best children's hospitals in the world." I challenge you to find a list that isn't at last 75% US hospitals. Most are over 90% US. If you have something that warrants it in the US, you're going to get into one of those hospitals and you're not going to pay anything.

>Our population is healthier, which probably helps keep costs down.

This not only keeps costs down, but also keeps health stats up. Your life expectancy is probably a lot better than ours, but you also have much lower obesity rates. People often cite our health outcomes with any context at all. Context matters. The fact that over a third of our population is obese matters. And not having to pay a copay isn't going to change that.

Yes, that's the whole point of my argument. We have the best because it's lucrative. The health care plans people tend to put forth to fix our system would make our healthcare system less lucrative.

>Danny Williams also claimed he traveled to the US to see a specific specialist, not because no one in his own province could do the surgery, although we can't know for sure.

Right, he went to where he believed the best specialist was. In the US.

> not take all that into consideration also seems disingenuous.

I didn't not take all that into consideration. In fact, it was the entirety of my consideration.

We have among the lowest life expectancy because we have among the highest obesity. That has almost nothing to do with healthcare access.

>There's a bunch of over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment in the US. These make customers feel like they're getting good service, even though they're being harmed by it.

If you really believe that getting too much access to healthcare treatments is the big problem in our country, you might be in the wrong discussion.

"The chronically homeless, on the other hand, are a subset of the homeless population that is often the most vulnerable. These are people who have been living on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the past three years, and who have a "disabling condition" that might include serious mental illness, an addiction or a physical disability or illness."

> Figure 2 shows that, measured by its point-in-time counts, Utah experienced a less dramatic, but still impressive 71 percent decrease in chronic homelessness since 2005. Yet should we trust even the point-in-time counts?

Yes. If you want to challenge them, go out and do point in time counts rather than suggest that someone is lying. In fact, challenging them in the manner that the writer is is fundamentally dishonest, suggesting again that research by its very nature shouldn't be trusted.

> In fact, as Figure 3 shows, there were major drop-offs in chronic homelessness during two separate periods: 2009–10 and 2014–15. If not for these two periods, chronic homelessness in Utah would have increased over the past decade.

Just because reductions appear during specific time periods during a research period does nothing to deny the fact that overall reductions occurred. This is like suggesting that a small uptick in violent crime means that crime hasn't reduced at all over the last several decades.

The entire article is anti-science, as the AEI all too often is. If you want to challenge research, you don't do it by suggesting someone is lying, you do it by using the scientific method. AEI really doesn't do any of that, it is primarily there to challenge research to protect support for conservative ideals while making them seem as if they are well researched.

If they want to prove to the chronically homeless that they can get a home, they only need to follow through with the home.

Or perhaps they want to prove to their constituents that the number of chronically homeless has diminished. Easy enough: tell their constituents where to go to count homeless people. Again, it's not incumbent upon them to count, or even to provide easy access to the location. Just give verifiable steps and expect your constituents to do some legwork. (Most won't, but maybe a news crew will.)

I see two scenarios that could be "shady": 1. The metric calculation is drastically changed (hasn't happened, to my knowledge) 2. The government somehow manages to "tweak" the economy in a way that artificially alters this metric (unlikely)

Regarding unemployment percent: The government doesn't have a lot of direct control over this (though federal spending does provide tons of jobs, obviously), but policy certainly can cause major implications. Health care, banking, and environmental regulations (to name a few) can cause massive shifts in employment.

Come to think of it, I can see a scenario where federal policy could keep the unemployment rate lower relative to other metrics: The Affordable Care Act made it easier for people to get coverage outside of employment. Perhaps this allowed some people to settle for less-than-full-time positions, or to remain unemployed for longer than they would have (perhaps to care for family, or to pursue an entrepreneurial dream, or education...). This could cause the traditional unemployment rate to remain artificially low, compared to before the ACA was implemented. No idea if this is actually true, and one could debate whether it's a good outcome or not, but it's an interesting possibility.