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Comment by floor2 | Hacker News Reader

> Voters need to wake up and recognize that they need to pay for solutions

I'm a middle-class nobody from a poor background, I own a single-story 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom house. I pay $18,000 a year in property taxes on my house. I pay an additional 8.5% sales tax on everything I buy locally. I pay tens of thousands of dollars every year in income taxes.

Just how much more do I need to pay? Why should we trust that giving the government even more money will solve the problem, when every previous experience shows that they spend massively while barely impacting the problem?

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Tbh the public is already overpaying severely with the status quo in terms of constantly paying for emergency services call outs.

Many experts have said that money would be saved by housing people instead of letting people unhealthily sleep outside and then spending money on emergency medical care.

Spending more money on capital projects like housing, if that means a pull back on high operating cost emergency services, then that is more financially sustainable than the status quo.

All I know is that the status quo isn’t solving the problem and spending less isn’t going to work.

Completely agree. It's a maddening conversation because this is fundamentally what the defend the police movement is about. Meat heads with a 6 months of training and a gun are the correct solution to almost no problems, yet occupy some of the largest budgets our cites and states have. Then we pass more and more laws to empower the meat heads and continue to wonder why nothing's working.

> Many experts have said that money would be saved by housing people instead of letting people unhealthily sleep outside and then spending money on emergency medical care.

To be fair, most of those experts are consultants, non-profit leaders, government employees, or talking heads who have a financial and reputation stake in a very particular type of solution, so I'd take that with a gigantic grain of salt.

These same types of experts have been trying to solve housing issues since at least the 1950's with more and more money being spent and little to show for it. If anything, the problems seem to be getting worse.

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