Guys relative poverty will always exist in a capitalist society so telling people to get rich is stupid . If wage goes up so does inflation and the poor as a percentage will STAY.

I understand the sports point about stopping people from reaching homelessness and as people here have identified the first step is having a healthy economy which will prevent joblessness. So vote for jobs first . I do think US economy is healthy and do produce enough jobs. I do not know about the outcasted people in US economy though. Such groups should be there.


People who have already been homeless need great support in terms of mental health as well as material conditions. Try getting a job with out internet connection these days and a laptop . As a society we do have the responsibility to reach peace collectively and only collectively we can reach.

So the argument that homeless people deserve no compassion misplaced and ignorant take. The resources are nobodies , rich people are just custodians of societies wealth in capitalism and they have moral responsibility to the poverty question.

Also biggest conundrum i have seen in economics is this.

More social welfare and taxation means less jobs in open market so job security of the poor traded for minimum payment security .

Less social security and taxation means more jobs in open market provided it is a proper capitalist society and not a crony capitalism.

Tax cut by Trump created the least unemployment figure in US history which even his biggest critics have to admit.

El Gunner wrote:as we've established in a chat before... Arabs are "simply different"

I don’t know, it sounds like the same mentality New Yorkers have when they bus their homeless people into Pennsylvania, and the same mentality Pennsylvanians have when they bus their homeless people into New York.

Look I’m not trying to come off as a dick so I’m sorry if it’s happening; I just don’t see a solution and it frustrates me.

FennecFox7 wrote:Look I’m not trying to come off as a dick so I’m sorry if it’s happening; I just don’t see a solution and it frustrates me.

In the future, then, you might want to avoid things like "I have no sympathy for XY", it sounds dick-adjacent, at least.
I think we can all appreciate the issue being frustrating though, especially once you dive into it and see that some help is misappropriated and things are really, really complicated.

The quality of homelessness on sportsczy's videos is on another level. There is a certain population which gets homeless: mostly young adult males or the ones in their 40s, very rarely females and extremly seldom families. You see families with children on the streets, lots of drug addicted young adult women etc. That's anything but normal in a healthy society. I read from that narration something is wrong with the society as a whole over there. Social care and more money aren't going to help.

USA and most of developed nations only improved materialistically not spiritually hence despite the wealth half the population lives like slaves.

Hapless_Hans wrote:Homeless people don't use coke ffs

coke is fucking expensive

It also doesn't help you sleep or forget

It's heroin and opioids in general.  

It just really pisses me off that San Francisco pays homeless people enough for them to get started... yet a large majority of that money goes towards drugs and alcohol according to data.

This isn't my "conservative thinking". It's hard facts. Giving money is absolutely not the solution until you can ascertain that the person can make good decisions with that money.  For that to happen, the first step is to kill the drugs... nobody, homeless or not, can make good decisions when addicted.

I'm not saying there should be a "War on Drugs" as it exists.  It's stupid because it punishes the victims in the US... the users.  I want an approach that specifically targets the perpetrators, which are the producers and distributors.  Stop punishing the victims imo.

sportsczy wrote:

Hapless_Hans wrote:Homeless people don't use coke ffs

coke is fucking expensive

It also doesn't help you sleep or forget

It's heroin and opioids in general.  

It just really pisses me off that San Francisco pays homeless people enough for them to get started... yet a large majority of that money goes towards drugs and alcohol according to data.

This isn't my "conservative thinking". It's hard facts. Giving money is absolutely not the solution until you can ascertain that the person can make good decisions with that money.  For that to happen, the first step is to kill the drugs... nobody, homeless or not, can make good decisions when addicted.

I'm not saying there should be a "War on Drugs" as it exists.  It's stupid because it punishes the victims in the US... the users.  I want an approach that specifically targets the perpetrators, which are the producers and distributors.  Stop punishing the victims imo.

Ive been doing philanthropy for 2 years now.

And providing funds to the homeless taught me if you give $6000 to a beggar it will be gone within a week and not on essentials. But if you give $6000 to an enterprising mind it'll be multiplied.

We can speak of helping the homeless at all but a lot here actually need to experience what the homeless are like from some being very innovative to most being utterly wasteful and content on handouts. Giving money to beggars if anything encourages their lifestyle as this is coming from someone who used to berate my brothers when they refused to.

The ideal would be teaching them how to get up from their squalor instead via influence and education.

Arquitecto wrote:The ideal would be teaching them how to get up from their squalor instead via influence and education.

This is the way, IMHO.

Exactly Arqi... I'm making general statements that hold true for a majority unfortunately. But there is a minority that truly will take the money and make something of themselves. I'm willing to accept that you will give bad money in order to make sure you find all the good people.

But when 2/3 of the money turns bad, that's not good enough. Not by a longshot. I can even accept 50.1% frankly. It has to do more good than harm IMO. Right now, the policies are doing harm.

@Babun. What you saw was Philadelphia and it's just appalling. I want to send the politicians involves to jail for 20 years just for allowing that to happen. The sad thing is that it's repeated in other places too.

Unbelievable.

what happens is that people go homeless, they often suffer a nervous breakdown or similar mental trauma as a result, the services don't catch them early enough or just aren't set up for it... so it becomes acute.  Drugs are either voluntarily taken to cope OR, and this disgustingly happens often, dealers give them free drugs to get them addicted.

Why free drugs to homeless people?  Because these dealers know that they will eventually get money from the government.  It's an investment.  F-in disgusting.  These people should get shot. I swear I would applaud it if people preying on the less fortunate, whether it be drugs, turning them into sex slaves (which happens too), etc. were just shot on the spot.

Last point for now... the homeless boom in the US recently is directly tied to the opioid crisis. Here's a common example: You get into a car accident and are given Fentanyl by the doctor to cope with the pain. Gets addicted to opioids... life goes down fast and ends up homeless.

Big pharma and pharmacies have a BIG chunk of responsibility here too. They should get hammered and the executives criminally prosecuted.

VivaStPauli wrote:

Arquitecto wrote:The ideal would be teaching them how to get up from their squalor instead via influence and education.

This is the way, IMHO.

In reality, in many cases, maybe most cases, this is just as useless as giving them money.

Oh yeah the act of teaching might be just as wasted as money might be.
I meant in the 'ideal' way, where the teachings stick. Obviously there's a ton of cases where people can't just be taught.

As I said in an earlier post - to me, this is mostly a mental health issue, and by that I don't mean that homeless people are all mental. But they're often psychologically unwell.
Though I admit that this is colored with my European bias. I know in the US you can just be randomly fired and lose your house a few weeks after. This would be an extremely fringe case here.

Food for thought.

Be able to fire people randomly is the reason that unemployment in the US is at 5.2% right now even after Covid19 (and a lot of that is because restaurants can't hire people since the pandemic unemployment checks are higher than minimum wage). My guess is that it will be at around 2% really quickly here. There's a massive labor shortage.

There's no question you have to try really really hard right now to not get a job in the US. It's practically impossible. Your ego has to get in the way or other crazy reasons for that to happen.

The current homeless craziness is opioid-related 100%. People who are doing ok or well just completely fall off the map in a matter of months. The videos you see are people who are addicted to drugs.

Sad thing is that big pharma and pharmacies are the drug dealers.

sportsczy wrote:
@Babun. What you saw was Philadelphia and it's just appalling. I want to send the politicians involves to jail for 20 years just for allowing that to happen. The sad thing is that it's repeated in other places too.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, we've got similar moral mindset. Families on the streets are a clear sign of moral desintegration. Something is wrong with the society. Children are the future, they should be treated and protected with atmost care. I really felt bad after watching that vid.
To counter your argument, those politicians are elected by people. People in democratic countries deserve the government they get so my point stands. Something is wrong with the people over there to allow such things to happen. We always say religion is evil from our atheist point of view but the opposite usually causes a misunderstood moral compass.

I'd like to add that labor shortages in the US are EXTREME.

Here's one article on the subject matter:  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/09/new-study-says-hidden-workers-are-being-excluded/

In August, half of U.S. small business owners had jobs they wanted to fill, a historic high, according to a trade group survey; 91 percent said there were few or no qualified applicants.

And that's the issue. You are unemployable when you're high on drugs and/or untrained. 99% of the time, if you're presentable and meet basic requirements (i.e. no felony criminal charges, decent appearance, etc.), the employer will train you themselves. YET, the US has booming homelessness.

There's a societal problem that is misunderstood.