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The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores an

The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores and make them terrible. You don't need to lock them up indefinitely, but you do need to move them somewhere else where they won't have hugely negative effects on the city and its populace. It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either, while it will make life for everyone else substantially better -- and we should be prioritizing the welfare of the productive members of society who actually pay to make all of it possible. Right now way too many cities have lost the plot by being too permissive of violations of the social contract, and everyone suffers as a result.

prawn 3y ago
I think you can provide services (shelters, etc) AND crackdown with a view to cleaning the city for regular people (rather than just specifying taxpayers).
- fragmede 3y ago
  More than a service, bring back the projects. Yes there were problems with them the last time around, but the problem we have now seems worse on all fronts.
vineyardmike 3y ago
I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment. There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.
- freetanga 3y ago
  Well, I agree halfway… at the core of any social contract are rights and obligations. I think part of those obligations are to contribute to society (I think we agree up to this point) However, I believe a part of that contribution has to be in an objective, quantifiable way - which translates to taxes. The rights we consume from society are tangible and expensive. A city populated only by of poets would collapse of starvation after 12 hours… That said, if a Society feels they need to foster a specific part of it (culture,social work, etc) they can enact tax breaks to reduce the financial load of those making that contribution. But taxation comes first (as an obligation).
  - flir 3y ago
    So which do you prefer to tack on the end of that: "...except for the disabled" or "...and to hell with the disabled"? Both are widely used.
    - freetanga 3y ago
      I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops. My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left). They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.
      - cogman10 3y ago
        One of the big issues with severe disability is the stupidly low cap on assets to qualify for social programs (SS, Medicaid). It was set in the 70s at $2000 and hasn't been changed since. This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.
        3y ago
- tw04 3y ago
  But our society rewards your societal contributions via monetary rewards which results in you paying taxes. Sure, the money you get does not necessarily reflect the value of you contributions fairly in most cases, but I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society. And not paying taxed can be because they have no job and make no money, or are so rich as to be able to write off all their income because they think they don’t owe anyone anything.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society Stay at home parents would fall into this category. I think the unit is "family" if it's a family, and not "person".
- thwarted 3y ago
  There is more to life than paying taxes Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.
  - cultureswitch 3y ago
    Actually, I pay taxes because I have to.
    - paulddraper 3y ago
      Same reason as death.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods. You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years. These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.
    - vineyardmike 3y ago
      You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit. You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back. You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away. Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
      - shiroiuma 3y ago
        >You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back. No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US. >Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay. You're not really a part of the society if you don't live there, but if you're a US Citizen, you're still required to pay both federal and state taxes, even if you've never lived in the US in the first place.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. What are they, and can I do them instead of paying taxes? Because paying taxes soaks up double digit percentages of my productive time and I reckon I could add a lot more value to society if I had alternatives.
  - u32480932048 3y ago
    You can provide art and music to the community, either by strumming your guitar aggressively at passers-by or turning up your boom box to max volume so everyone can hear your shitty music. /s
- dannersy 3y ago
  I agree but also think it goes further than that. The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. Which is a separate discussion we could have, but I think it's especially disingenuous as a country still dealing with an opioid crisis. I know first hand people who went and paid for school, got jobs and healthcare, and became addicts. It literally happened to them (I chose that wording carefully) by being treated with over prescribed highly addictive substances. The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.
  - evandale 3y ago
    > The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street. There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept. As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.
    - gota 3y ago
      > Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. Rarely I'll state something so strongly - this is true at face value but in the context you meant it is so fundamentally wrong it borders insanity. The entire reason we have regulation and reputation-based systems in place (like diplomas from accredited universities, or the bar, etc.) is to allow the individual to delegate decisions to specialists. That is why practicing medicine without appropriate training is a crime (in most/all countries I know of). Do you also want me to get out of my car and do some quick analysis of the structural integrity of every bridge I'm going to cross? Or are you goin to blame me if the bridge collapses and kills me? Again, back to the case at hand - the whole purpose of having medical professionals is to follow their advice. If they are prescribing you poison the solution is obviously to prosecute them through the judicial system, not undoying every trust-based system that makes complex professions in society even remotely possible/functional
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back. This thread is about the extreme opposite of this, though. Taking from net contributors and using that money to create a place that's to their extreme detriment, because incredibly it's a votewinner, is the current situation.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers. Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).
  - jstarfish 3y ago
    > Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? Noble savages? Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest. Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial. Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      Drug addicts are victims of a very civilizational pathology, so more like the opposite of savages. I was more getting at whatever good they might do (?) in their own very informal societies—societies that most people either shy away from or are oblivious to, so it’s very difficult for most people to know whatever pro-social activities they do.
    - Dweller1622 3y ago
      > Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers[...] This seems like a strange conception of addiction, unless we aren't seriously comparing mountain climbing with heroin. If we are then I wonder what utility the classification of addiction is actually supposed to provide to us.
      - anon373839 3y ago
        If an argument is conceivable, there is always at least one HNer who will feel compelled to make it.
- rainsford 3y ago
  I think it's also bad messaging (even though I agree with the overall sentiment as well) because "paying taxes" and "being productive" are sliding scales rather than binary. And a lot of people can and do extend the argument to prioritizing people who pay the most taxes or the right kind of taxes or are productive in the right way. In the context of who a city is "for", it often becomes about prioritizing people who own their dwelling over those who rent, even though renters certainly meet the threshold of contributing to a society and paying taxes. It seems possible to both agree with the idea that it's bad if a city's downtown is full of homeless drug addicts while disagreeing with the idea of trying to sort city residents into worthy and not worthy.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  "Taxpayers" is a word people use when they want to say "workers" without the baggage of sounding like a communist. I don't think it's so much about paying taxes.
- culopatin 3y ago
  Did they say “all there is to life is to pay taxes”? You’re reading what you want to read and shifting the conversation. There is a social contract that the majority of the population voted for you like it or not. That’s what society is. If you want to follow your own calendar, pay with your own money, not share your bread with the rest of the team, then don’t expect that team to pay for your needles, clean your poop, and also expect them to let you continue doing this indefinitely in the nicest parts of the town that was built with the shared bread of everyone else. The “contribution to society” we agreed on at a monetary level is taxes. We agreed on it so hard that if I don’t pay them I go to jail. Why should I be happy to use that for people who don’t want to be part of that system? What contribution to the greater society are hard drug users or homeless with mental issues without a recovery plan giving the society? Are they donating their time to clean up downtown? Trimming weeds? Walking old ladies across the street? Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?
- ip26 3y ago
  It's simpler than that. - cities are economic engines - economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue - if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  What should a city do when the people that pay taxes and keep the machine chugging along decide to leave because the city is becoming an unbearable mess? It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes. I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.
bbor 3y ago
It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown? I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away
- gexla 3y ago
  > What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.
  - culopatin 3y ago
    And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit
    - gexla 3y ago
      Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.
      - bbor 3y ago
dtx1 3y ago
The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city. I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society. Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.
- soco 3y ago
  Unfortunately we have the police for dealing with violations, and when you have a (expensive) hammer everything starts to look like a nail. What I mean is, I agree with both viewpoints: something must be done (don't even bother saying taxpayers - the addicts don't have it easy either), and jail/beating is definitely not that thing. I know this was said already but seeing the actual situation I think it's worth repeating.
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago
  You can't help a person if they don't want to be helped. At the very least you can remove them from the society to make it safe and maybe make the person rethink their life. By shielding a drug addict from the consequences of their wrong life choices you are preventing their potential rehabilitation, unless they've been lost completely, of course.
  - achenet 3y ago
    comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions. Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.
creata 3y ago
[flagged]
alistairSH 3y ago
...but you do need to move them somewhere else ... So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|
- culopatin 3y ago
  Somewhere else could be a recovery facility, housing located in a cheaper area so it’s cheaper to run, not an active volcano or a small town downtown.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Absolutely agreed + the second you start shaming people for complaining about this you've lost the plot People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.
gloosx 3y ago
For sure, you have productive members who can execute unlimited violence in the name of law, why not using them to displace the poor and ill away from the streets completely? Clean em up from scum eh. A brilliant idea of a mindful reactionist. The soviets did this by the way, and they were able to completely hide the problem, however they never understood that showing it boldly on the streets to all the "taxpayers" is the first step to solution
- sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [dead]

prawn 3y ago

I think you can provide services (shelters, etc) AND crackdown with a view to cleaning the city for regular people (rather than just specifying taxpayers).

fragmede 3y ago
More than a service, bring back the projects. Yes there were problems with them the last time around, but the problem we have now seems worse on all fronts.

vineyardmike 3y ago

I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment. There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.

freetanga 3y ago
Well, I agree halfway… at the core of any social contract are rights and obligations. I think part of those obligations are to contribute to society (I think we agree up to this point) However, I believe a part of that contribution has to be in an objective, quantifiable way - which translates to taxes. The rights we consume from society are tangible and expensive. A city populated only by of poets would collapse of starvation after 12 hours… That said, if a Society feels they need to foster a specific part of it (culture,social work, etc) they can enact tax breaks to reduce the financial load of those making that contribution. But taxation comes first (as an obligation).
- flir 3y ago
  So which do you prefer to tack on the end of that: "...except for the disabled" or "...and to hell with the disabled"? Both are widely used.
  - freetanga 3y ago
    I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops. My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left). They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      One of the big issues with severe disability is the stupidly low cap on assets to qualify for social programs (SS, Medicaid). It was set in the 70s at $2000 and hasn't been changed since. This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.
      - 3y ago
tw04 3y ago
But our society rewards your societal contributions via monetary rewards which results in you paying taxes. Sure, the money you get does not necessarily reflect the value of you contributions fairly in most cases, but I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society. And not paying taxed can be because they have no job and make no money, or are so rich as to be able to write off all their income because they think they don’t owe anyone anything.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society Stay at home parents would fall into this category. I think the unit is "family" if it's a family, and not "person".
thwarted 3y ago
There is more to life than paying taxes Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  Actually, I pay taxes because I have to.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    Same reason as death.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  There is no option to opt-out of paying taxes and voluntarily live in the woods. You have to pay taxes. In fact, you have to pay taxes even if you're living in another country for multiple years. These claims are ridiculous and border delusional.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit. You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back. You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away. Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      >You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back. No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US. >Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay. You're not really a part of the society if you don't live there, but if you're a US Citizen, you're still required to pay both federal and state taxes, even if you've never lived in the US in the first place.
roenxi 3y ago
> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. What are they, and can I do them instead of paying taxes? Because paying taxes soaks up double digit percentages of my productive time and I reckon I could add a lot more value to society if I had alternatives.
- u32480932048 3y ago
  You can provide art and music to the community, either by strumming your guitar aggressively at passers-by or turning up your boom box to max volume so everyone can hear your shitty music. /s
dannersy 3y ago
I agree but also think it goes further than that. The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. Which is a separate discussion we could have, but I think it's especially disingenuous as a country still dealing with an opioid crisis. I know first hand people who went and paid for school, got jobs and healthcare, and became addicts. It literally happened to them (I chose that wording carefully) by being treated with over prescribed highly addictive substances. The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.
- evandale 3y ago
  > The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street. There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept. As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.
  - gota 3y ago
    > Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. Rarely I'll state something so strongly - this is true at face value but in the context you meant it is so fundamentally wrong it borders insanity. The entire reason we have regulation and reputation-based systems in place (like diplomas from accredited universities, or the bar, etc.) is to allow the individual to delegate decisions to specialists. That is why practicing medicine without appropriate training is a crime (in most/all countries I know of). Do you also want me to get out of my car and do some quick analysis of the structural integrity of every bridge I'm going to cross? Or are you goin to blame me if the bridge collapses and kills me? Again, back to the case at hand - the whole purpose of having medical professionals is to follow their advice. If they are prescribing you poison the solution is obviously to prosecute them through the judicial system, not undoying every trust-based system that makes complex professions in society even remotely possible/functional
robertlagrant 3y ago
> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back. This thread is about the extreme opposite of this, though. Taking from net contributors and using that money to create a place that's to their extreme detriment, because incredibly it's a votewinner, is the current situation.
avgcorrection 3y ago
We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers. Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? Noble savages? Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers among us are our pioneers. Everest wasn't Hillary's first climb, it was his tallest. Think about the implications of that though. Pioneers die...a lot. As a group the addict class are probably meant to be sacrificial. Pathological addiction subverts that. It's a problem in that they risk their lives for no real benefit to anyone.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    Drug addicts are victims of a very civilizational pathology, so more like the opposite of savages. I was more getting at whatever good they might do (?) in their own very informal societies—societies that most people either shy away from or are oblivious to, so it’s very difficult for most people to know whatever pro-social activities they do.
  - Dweller1622 3y ago
    > Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers[...] This seems like a strange conception of addiction, unless we aren't seriously comparing mountain climbing with heroin. If we are then I wonder what utility the classification of addiction is actually supposed to provide to us.
    - anon373839 3y ago
      If an argument is conceivable, there is always at least one HNer who will feel compelled to make it.
rainsford 3y ago
I think it's also bad messaging (even though I agree with the overall sentiment as well) because "paying taxes" and "being productive" are sliding scales rather than binary. And a lot of people can and do extend the argument to prioritizing people who pay the most taxes or the right kind of taxes or are productive in the right way. In the context of who a city is "for", it often becomes about prioritizing people who own their dwelling over those who rent, even though renters certainly meet the threshold of contributing to a society and paying taxes. It seems possible to both agree with the idea that it's bad if a city's downtown is full of homeless drug addicts while disagreeing with the idea of trying to sort city residents into worthy and not worthy.
carlosjobim 3y ago
"Taxpayers" is a word people use when they want to say "workers" without the baggage of sounding like a communist. I don't think it's so much about paying taxes.
culopatin 3y ago
Did they say “all there is to life is to pay taxes”? You’re reading what you want to read and shifting the conversation. There is a social contract that the majority of the population voted for you like it or not. That’s what society is. If you want to follow your own calendar, pay with your own money, not share your bread with the rest of the team, then don’t expect that team to pay for your needles, clean your poop, and also expect them to let you continue doing this indefinitely in the nicest parts of the town that was built with the shared bread of everyone else. The “contribution to society” we agreed on at a monetary level is taxes. We agreed on it so hard that if I don’t pay them I go to jail. Why should I be happy to use that for people who don’t want to be part of that system? What contribution to the greater society are hard drug users or homeless with mental issues without a recovery plan giving the society? Are they donating their time to clean up downtown? Trimming weeds? Walking old ladies across the street? Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?
ip26 3y ago
It's simpler than that. - cities are economic engines - economic engines generate both wealth and tax revenue - if you don't care for the economic engine, you lose your tax revenue Everything the government does is built upon tax revenue.
surgical_fire 3y ago
What should a city do when the people that pay taxes and keep the machine chugging along decide to leave because the city is becoming an unbearable mess? It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes. I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.

bbor 3y ago

It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown? I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away

gexla 3y ago
> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.
- culopatin 3y ago
  And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit
  - gexla 3y ago
    Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.
    - bbor 3y ago

dtx1 3y ago

The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city. I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society. Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.

soco 3y ago
Unfortunately we have the police for dealing with violations, and when you have a (expensive) hammer everything starts to look like a nail. What I mean is, I agree with both viewpoints: something must be done (don't even bother saying taxpayers - the addicts don't have it easy either), and jail/beating is definitely not that thing. I know this was said already but seeing the actual situation I think it's worth repeating.
cynicalsecurity 3y ago
You can't help a person if they don't want to be helped. At the very least you can remove them from the society to make it safe and maybe make the person rethink their life. By shielding a drug addict from the consequences of their wrong life choices you are preventing their potential rehabilitation, unless they've been lost completely, of course.
- achenet 3y ago
  comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions. Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.

creata 3y ago

[flagged]

alistairSH 3y ago

...but you do need to move them somewhere else ... So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|

culopatin 3y ago
Somewhere else could be a recovery facility, housing located in a cheaper area so it’s cheaper to run, not an active volcano or a small town downtown.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

Absolutely agreed + the second you start shaming people for complaining about this you've lost the plot People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.

gloosx 3y ago

For sure, you have productive members who can execute unlimited violence in the name of law, why not using them to displace the poor and ill away from the streets completely? Clean em up from scum eh. A brilliant idea of a mindful reactionist. The soviets did this by the way, and they were able to completely hide the problem, however they never understood that showing it boldly on the streets to all the "taxpayers" is the first step to solution

sieabahlpark 3y ago
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