> End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion) The problem with this way of thinking is: we've already spent this amount of money on ending homelessnes

> End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion) The problem with this way of thinking is: we've already spent this amount of money on ending homelessness. California plans on spending $4.8 billion next year [1]. HUD has a budget of around $2.7 billion [2]. In 2019, the City of New York spent $3.2 billion [3]. I haven't bothered to do a full accounting of how much we've spent on homelessness over the past 5 years, but from those three data points it seems safe to extrapolate we've spent over $20 billion. This is also in the context of the larger War on Poverty, which has spent an estimated $15 trillion since the program started in the 1960's [4]. It seems that simply throwing money at problems is insufficient. > "The options are stark reminders of public good we forsake in refusing to redistribute wealth." - Newsweek One could just as easily make a game that did something similar with the US government's budget. The overall budget is something like $4 Trillion. Just the annual interest payments are on the order of $250 Billion. If we had a more fiscally responsible approach to budgeting and therefore didn't have to make interest payments, according to that game we could "repair Puerto Rico," "hire 100,000 new teachers," and "end homeless in the United States." We already redistribute wealth on a grand scale. It's also not like the wealth of billionaires is just in a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault that they swim in all day, nor are they like Smaug, holed up in a cave sitting on vast amounts of gold and precious stones. The wealth is invested in various things, which in turn serve the public good. 1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/california-budget-homelessness-spending https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/californ... 2. https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/federal-funding-homelessness-programs/ https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/feder... 3. https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty