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I chose to "live rough" for about a month before I found an affordable room to live in when I first got to NYC. But I was bootstrapping my move to NYC. This pa

I chose to "live rough" for about a month before I found an affordable room to live in when I first got to NYC. But I was bootstrapping my move to NYC. This past Saturday, I served homeless from a soup kitchen in Harlem. Most of the people we served were on their own, and a sizable minority were loopy. Some of them probably weren't homeless. Anecdotally, I know a guy (who I tried to help again and again) whose bad decisions and self-sabotage screwed up all of his chances. He has lost job after job. And he has two kids he can't/won't support. Whenever he gets a chance, i.e., someone hires him, he works a max of two weeks, then gets trashed on his first bit of money and gets immediately fired because he doesn't show up for work. And he'll live on the street, in a tent in the woods, or where-ever he can keep his head out of the rain. It's hard for me to drum up much sympathy for him and others like him. Then there's people who make poor educational decisions, family planning decisions, and financial decisions, who live paycheck to paycheck, then lose their jobs simply due to changes the economy - they may have made sub-optimal economic decisions. Or there could be health problems that destroy their finances, and but for the grace of God many others of us could be in their shoes. And they deserve to have some help, and I even give my own money (my after-tax income) to help people like that. They don't deserve to be thrown out of their house. What they need is a second chance and the help from those of us who could easily be in their situations. We need to try to get the aid to those deserving, as opposed to the wastrels in the earlier example of my "friend," and similar lifestyle hobos, or in the case of those who are making a conscious bootstrapping decision like Austen and myself. This is America (or perhaps, a civilized global society). We don't let people starve in the streets.

eigenvector 12y ago
> We need to try to get the aid to those deserving, as opposed to the wastrels in the earlier example of my "friend," and similar lifestyle hobos, or in the case of those who are making a conscious bootstrapping decision like Austen and myself. The easiest way to do that is to just help everybody. The money we already spend on welfare is enough to provide basic assistance to everybody, without wasting money on figuring out who doesn't deserve it and crafting elaborate schemes to keep them out. Not to mention that even when people are self-destructive like your acquaintance, helping them out can still be cheaper than dealing with the costs of their homelessness, like constant interactions with police and ER trips because they don't have a warm, sheltered place to sleep. Our welfare systems are designed around a fear of free-riders, rather than to be simple and easy to administer. Soup kitchens are a perfect example - sure, there's always a few people there who don't really NEED it, but trying to keep them out would be inefficient and use up more resources than the $2-3 of food they're getting.
- aaronchall 12y ago
  Soup kitchens are on one end of the spectrum. You're right, there were people there who kept coming back for loaves of bread and more bananas, and more punch and lemonade, and we just gave it to them. They just had to stand in line again. And I don't begrudge giving more bread away, that is its purpose, and I hope it finds its way into the mouths of those who need it. If people will abuse that system, they'll abuse them all, and I think the cost of preventing welfare abuse is worth it. In welfare-state Britain of the 70's, they had multiple generations on public assistance and in public housing who were proud, as a culture, of their unproductivity, which led to the backlash that brought Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives into power. Bottomline: if you want to ensure the deserving get your tax dollars consistently over time, you must guard against fraud, abuse, and overindulgence, or the public backlash may deprive even the deserving.

eigenvector 12y ago

> We need to try to get the aid to those deserving, as opposed to the wastrels in the earlier example of my "friend," and similar lifestyle hobos, or in the case of those who are making a conscious bootstrapping decision like Austen and myself. The easiest way to do that is to just help everybody. The money we already spend on welfare is enough to provide basic assistance to everybody, without wasting money on figuring out who doesn't deserve it and crafting elaborate schemes to keep them out. Not to mention that even when people are self-destructive like your acquaintance, helping them out can still be cheaper than dealing with the costs of their homelessness, like constant interactions with police and ER trips because they don't have a warm, sheltered place to sleep. Our welfare systems are designed around a fear of free-riders, rather than to be simple and easy to administer. Soup kitchens are a perfect example - sure, there's always a few people there who don't really NEED it, but trying to keep them out would be inefficient and use up more resources than the $2-3 of food they're getting.

aaronchall 12y ago
Soup kitchens are on one end of the spectrum. You're right, there were people there who kept coming back for loaves of bread and more bananas, and more punch and lemonade, and we just gave it to them. They just had to stand in line again. And I don't begrudge giving more bread away, that is its purpose, and I hope it finds its way into the mouths of those who need it. If people will abuse that system, they'll abuse them all, and I think the cost of preventing welfare abuse is worth it. In welfare-state Britain of the 70's, they had multiple generations on public assistance and in public housing who were proud, as a culture, of their unproductivity, which led to the backlash that brought Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives into power. Bottomline: if you want to ensure the deserving get your tax dollars consistently over time, you must guard against fraud, abuse, and overindulgence, or the public backlash may deprive even the deserving.