03-04-2020, 10:28 PM
(03-04-2020, 08:49 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(03-04-2020, 11:58 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-04-2020, 09:35 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: Of course the economy can be good when there are "so many" homeless.
1. "So many" is still a tiny number compared to the total population. The economy can be good without reaching impossible perfection for every person.
2. A significant proportion of the homeless choose to live that way over their available options to live in a home. Why should we deny them agency to make their own choices?
A quick google brought up 552,830 homeless one night in 2018. That is about 17 per 10,000 people. If one’s heart is small enough, and of course you happen not to be one of the half million, you can ignore them.
This is one of the differences between red and blue. Does making life better for more really hurt those who have no need? Is there a floor below which you should strive to provide protection? Some hearts are just harder than others.
Indeed a key difference between red and blue is that the progressives care about the 0.17%, but don't care about the 30% that are working and struggling to make ends meet and to get the best education for their kids. In contrast, conservatives understand that 30% represents more than 100x as many people as 0.17%, so they care more about the 30%.
Let's put it this way -- the ICU treats people in (at least apparent) life-threatening situations. That's for a heart attack, and not for a sunburn. That is for severe burns and not for a minor burn such as one that I recently got (I leaned over a frying pan and touched the hot handle with my bare arm. I did not go to the emergency room for that). Homelessness is potentially a dangerous situation. Homeless people are often vulnerable to criminals.
To be sure, some people are at fault for being homeless even as a transitory situation (such as being kicked out of a family home for being abusive or strung out). Some are runaways either from a pathological household or from such a horrible situation as human trafficking. Some are people with big problems -- drifters who cannot connect with any community at all, people who belong in drug rehab or mental institutions, people on the run from the law... Some have the problem of being priced out of local housing. One might be able to write in Traverse City, Michigan for a firm in New York City, but one cannot work remotely as a shop clerk. Some people are simply priced out of local housing. Some are in transition after a disaster (a fire sweeps through an apartment complex... and the former residents are then homeless).
If even a few are priced out of local housing, then many others surely exist on the borderline of that situation. Being close to that level of what most of us consider extreme poverty is itself poverty. Poverty can as much be having extreme needs and not the means. Maybe we have put too much emphasis on building "luxury" housing and not on building housing that poor people need. Maybe the movers-and-shakers have decided that transient hotels are nuisances in many cities. "Luxury" (I hate that word, as it means the vices of excess and waste that hurt others elsewhere), is almost always marketable for far more than is something 'affordable'.
I do not have a problem with making things easier for the 30% who struggle for survival under a contemporary paradigm in which most of us exist with a purpose that we wish that we could deny -=- making people already filthy-rich even more filthy-rich.
We face a harsh economic transition that few foresaw -- the end of the era of scarcity in which meeting unmet needs is a reliable means of making a good living. That allowed factory workers to live well if they made the big-ticket items that many did not yet have. Now such arises from either population growth or replacement, and the manufacture of such things is often done overseas. Services? Many people can put off a carpet-cleaning if someone spills some red pop. Maybe if you are in a bind you can cut the cable and find out what you are missing (really, not much but a waste of time).
It may be an oversimplification, but many people are where the jobs aren't... and the jobs are where housing is inadequate for the number of jobs. To work for New York wages even as a store clerk and face the housing costs of Youngstown, Ohio would be economic bliss. Few get that opportunity.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.