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Comment by adamdusty | Hacker News Reader

If your mom tells you and your brother to clean the house, bathe the dogs, wash the cars, and repaint the living room, and you do all of it while your brother is sick, you wouldn't feel slightly upset if she paid his rent and you got nothing? Most people don't want all those people to be homeless, but it does feel punishing that other people are having their way paid for while contributing less.

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I would not feel upset in that scenario. I would feel upset if my mother didn’t pay my brother’s rent and then my brother stole from me for food money and set up camp on my sidewalk, then died 9 months later.

Homeless isn’t just something that impacts the person without the home, it effects everyone.

> but it does feel punishing that other people are having their way paid for while contributing less.

How Dickensian. Nothing is being done to you, so I fail to see how this could be seen as "punishing." It's not like living at the mercy of a state program is a good outcome -- before this program was announced, the life situations of many of these people and their dependents who "contribute less" was far, far more precarious. Why not just see this as an act of overdue mercy -- an act of your greater community pulling together to overcome a devastating plague that profoundly affected us all?

Taxpayers are ultimately paying for this, so yes something is being done to everyone who pays taxes in California. And if someone made every effort to pay rent, and another person with the same income did not pay rent, that second person will have an advantage when renting in the future since they will have more cash on hand.

TFA states that the money is from aid packages from Congress, so not really.

Also, how do you know that this is giving the recipients any advantage? If they're behind on their rent, they're already in shitty financial circumstances and probably already received credit score decreases.

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