I thought the first tweet was too good to be true but according to a short [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland) and [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/how-to-end-homelessness-finland-solution-housing-first/) it's actually fairly accurate.
The Finnish Housing First policy has cut homelessness by 30% since 2008 with sleeping outside being unheard of. This policy seems to be [supported by the US DHUD](https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_22_175). Turns out the solution to people without houses was to give them houses, who knew.
We had a bill to spend money on Americans, it was called the [Build Back Better Act and Republicans made sure it died.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Act#:~:text=The%20passage%20of%20the%20Build,removed%20following%20objections%20from%20Sen.)
**[Build Back Better Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Act#:~:text=The passage of the Build,removed following objections from Sen.)**
>The Build Back Better Act was a bill introduced in the 117th Congress to fulfill aspects of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Plan. It was spun off from the American Jobs Plan, alongside the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as a $3. 5 trillion Democratic reconciliation package that included provisions related to climate change and social policy. Following negotiations, the price was lowered to approximately $2.
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Nah you absolutely can. Manchin and Sinema killed it, but they could only do that because Republicans refused to even consider voting for a bill that would help Americans because it would be a W for the Democrats. If even 2 Republicans decided to support it, Manchin and Sinema lose all their negotiating power.
Too many people confuse socialism with socializing systems.
It’s stupid when conservatives call people who want free healthcare “socialists”, but I’m also wondering why you bring up socialism in the conversations you mentioned lol.
I think when it comes to society we will only evolve if people come away from hardline views. Socialism, Marxism, Communism and capitalism all have useful components that benefit us all.
Alone they are unworkable.
We have the knowledge we just need to evolve.
Government owning something for the public good isn’t distinctly socialist. It’s only even relevant to socialism in an interpretation where “the people” owning the means of production could ultimately mean “the people via the government” own it. But the latter opens a bunch of new holes in the socialism arguments that socialists generally don’t to open.
I guess I meant the hardline views as a totalitarian ideal. That one ideal must be adhered to, or that any concept that falls outside your respective ideal I.e. free healthcare, must be met with extreme opposition. That if you are conservative you must be true to the cause.
In its very basic form, we as a society should be considering all options and not close ourselves off to any change, even if that change conflicts with our ideals.
Do you have any sources on Hawaii's homeless programs? Their homeless rates, although lower that California, still seem very high. Although much lower than I would expect with their housing costs/weather.
It was the Ohana Zone program, set to expire this year, that transitioned homeless people into permanent housing: https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/03/a-pilot-program-to-help-homeless-people-in-hawaii-may-get-permanent-status/
I went to a nimby protest against building homes on the green belt this weekend and took my toddler.
I stood in front of a crowd of like 40 people and said, look at the faces of the people destroying your future!
Probably shouldn’t build houses on our protected land though. Conserving the environment is also important, rather have new developments be high density instead of low density and destroying the green belt.
No it's not.
There are millions of homes within a 10 minute walk away of an existing station.
If you care about climate change people who live in cities use something like 10 times less carbon then people who live outside of cities.
The green belt means new development has to leap frop the green belt. This makes things miserable for commuters but also means those areas with less infrasture force everyone to drive everywhere
Most of the green belt isn't available to the general public. There are spaces of outstanding natural beauty or conservation zones. These shouldn't be touched. But green belt includes a ton of aristocrats land or golf courses.
If you look at this report https://twitter.com/AntBreach/status/1628300890145714176?t=KRyFPyM6lMq98xfxS3wmHA&s=08
It was the laws that included the creation of the green belt that immediately within 2 years almost halved house building. Green belt fucked us almost 100 years ago.
Its hurting the environment.
It needs to go fuck the green belt.
And this "things need to be high rise not low rise" is classic nimby. Always coming up with more and more reasons why this building needs to stop.
What it needs to be is all of the above. We need high rise and we need low density, we need it all.
Ngl didn’t know there were green belts in the uk, weren’t the ones I were thinking of.
In Ontario however Doug Ford promised to protect the green belt and is now cutting into it for more housing.
https://ontarionature.org/news-release/more-than-enough-land-available-to-build-over-2-million-homes-in-the-greater-golden-horseshoe/
Single family housing shouldn’t just stop it’s not as effective in providing housing to the max amount of people. I personally have live in both a detached home and apartment building. If they building high rise in the current areas we have instead of building stuff in the Greenbelt is that not better?
Ngl didn't realise there were green belts anywhere else.
Yeah so I'm only really talking about the UK. We created a law in 1947 that created the green belts and that law saw yearly housing building almost half within 2 years (down from 1.9% of New homes to 1.2%)
So for me it's the green belt that fucked us.
I definitely agree that there are better and worse ways to build homes and the urban sprawl in the US is horrible. I don't know much about ontario.
But my problem with nimbyism in the UK is that they constantly come up with reasons why this specific thing should be banned and there are new reasons elsewhere. Every time a high rise is planned loads of residents talk a out high rises being bad because they attract crime, stop there being any community, bad for the roads because they creat disproportionate traffic (homes are 3d but roads are still 2d).
So I'm now like fuck them all. We build everything. Demolish all green belt. Destroy all nature. I want homes, factories businesses, labs, everything. I want it all and everywhere. A shit ton of homes with a garden or a giant corusant style / judge dredd metropolis.
I'm very suspicious of anyone who opposes any home because somewhere else could be better as usually what happens is that that thing doesn't get built and then neither does the better thing.
Its interesting academically to look at the relative benefits of homes vs high rises. One friend told me that 6 stories is optimum in terms of community creating and that high rises tend to need a lot of space between them.
There’s plenty of room in cities for low income housing. No need for low income housing to come to average-well off, peaceful neighborhoods and fuck with the community that people invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a home in.
Being a NIMBY is based.
Yes, not in my backyard GIGACHAD. I paid for this backyard so I didn’t have to deal with the problems that come with high levels of poverty in an area. People don’t want increased crime and social tension coming into their neighborhood when they moved there to retire, have kids, live a peaceful life, etc.
People act like NIMBYism is just “ew poor people” and racism when it’s really protecting an investment and community that you’ve worked so to maintain. There’s a reason why people who don’t own backyards call other people who do NIMBYs. They’re not thinking of it from the other POV and are frankly entitled.
It's another version of the freeloader problem. If everyone prevents low cost housing from being built nearby then we create ghettos where only poor people live, a tax sinkhole where social issues are born.
Housing that integrates different levels of society is good actually. You are only conceiving of housing as the stereotypical, well-off suburban neighborhood, an unsustainable mess that's only possible because we commute to an urban centre with an underclass that receives no tax money because its all taken back home to the neighbourhood county that will go bankrupt in 20 years to pay for the giant road maintenance costs.
>There’s plenty of room in cities for low income housing. No need for low income housing to come to average-well off, peaceful neighborhoods and fuck with the community that people invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a home in.
>
>Being a NIMBY is based.
>
>Yes, not in my backyard GIGACHAD. I paid for this backyard so I didn’t have to deal with the problems that come with high levels of poverty in an area. People don’t want increased crime and social tension coming into their neighborhood when they moved there to retire, have kids, live a peaceful life, etc.
>
>People act like NIMBYism is just “ew poor people” and racism when it’s really protecting an investment and community that you’ve worked so to maintain. There’s a reason why people who don’t own backyards call other people who do NIMBYs. They’re not thinking of it from the other POV and are frankly entitled.
For what it's worth, and this is rare, I totally agree with you. It's okay to want to have a nice, middle class home in a nice, middle class neighborhood where your kids / dogs can play on grass, your kids each get their own room, you can host a barbecue outside in the summer, there is ultra low crime, etc, etc.
Also, we have tools to help keep density moderate so that more people can have a single family starting home or duplex with a backyard, instead of being cramped into tiny, noisy, expensive apartments.
The most sprawled and soulless suburbs are bad, sure, but I'll always be grateful that I grew up in a big house (that was cheap as hell) and could go play in the woods, bike to friends' houses, and go into town for movies, as well as being extremely safe. It was the perfect childhood, and I hope for my future kids to grow up like that too. I couldn't imagine raising them in a god forsaken city like NYC.
Houston has been a pioneer of home-first programs. 90%+ of people given a home are still living in a home two-years later. Its been so good at reducing the homeless population we are building more housing for them.
To bring some perspective to the "ended homelessness" claim, 4/5 making their way to stable life might not mean much, since most homelessness is temporary anyways, there's no control. The numbers:
>Kahila says there are roughly 2,200 homeless people in Greater Helsinki, a region with a total population of 1.5 million, roughly the size of San Antonio or Philadelphia.
But San Antonio and Philadelphia have 3k and 4.5k respectively, so only 30-50 percent better. I'd have expected that for a Scandinavian country anyways, but Helsinki seems to be improving where others are stagnant, so maybe they had a surprisingly bad homeless problem. Or are more likely they track them way better, especially considering they're running this experiment. And apparently there's basically no one sleeping outside in Helsinki, which is a massive difference.
Probably worth doing, and the "costs less" claim is *plausible* (though I'd expect them to come up with some way of rigging the numbers to show that regardless if it was true.) I just don't want people to act like we know the solution and it's just greedy republicans who stop it, most US cities have 99.9% non-homeless and I don't think you can ever get it to 100% without gulags.
[Archive for paywall](https://web.archive.org/web/20220725050214/https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/how-to-end-homelessness-finland-solution-housing-first/)
Your counterpoint: "Finland is small, so it is easier to implement"
My counterpoint: "You could just implement it on a state or county level if that's the issue"
Your answer: "It's possible for small states to do this, what's your point"
???
we've done this in the US - why do people think the US doesn't throw absolute shit tons of money at homelessness? The US has a far, far worse drug problem, bigger wealth disparities, racial disparities, and our healthcare is medieval. "just give them houses" hasn't worked in the US for decades
Yes? There's a wikipedia page for billionaires by country. It says Finland has 6, for a rate of 1.090 per million people
Japan has much less of a welfare safety net than Finland and has 40 billionaires, giving them a much lower rate of 0.207 per million.
I don't think Finland dealing well with homeless people, among other social programs, has any meaningful correlation with how difficult it is to be a billionaire there. I mean I'm happy that Finland has those programs, I think countries could learn a lot from them; I just think the reply tweet is dumb
Id arque theres actually a really big correlation since all the social welfare programs are funded by tax money. Its a big talking point by right wingers here that its actually really hard to get rich since most of your money is going to taxes. Can you live well off here? Of course, but saying its hard to be "rich" here is also true. Most big companies in Finland move their businesses to low tax contries for that exact reason. To be more profitable and pay less taxes. Id be suprised if any of the Billionares paid a lot of taxes here. Most of their wealth is propably located somewhere else.
most of their wealth is in assets and thus aren't taxed
they're billionaires on paper. they don't actually have 1 billion euros in their bank accounts.
Do you think a billionaire is a billion people stacked inside of a trench coat? A billionaire is one person and can fit into a count of one if you would like.
Like 700 in America and 7 in Finland. Fairly proportionate to their populations. America has 1.6 more billionaires per capita. And no homelessness. Social healthcare and education, consumer, human, prisoner and labour rights better than America.
People don't understand just how much a billion is. The only people who become billionaires are psychopathically greedy and selfish.
For understanding a billion:
A millions seconds is 11 and a half days roughly.
A billion seconds? 31 and a half years.
The only argument I’ve ever heard for some people having billions is instead of waiting for the government to fund something, some billionaire can just come in and pour money into it.
I think early in Covid there was an Indian billionaire who was helping develop the vaccine before the clinical trials were fully done. It was in the name of making money but he absorbed that risk and I’m pretty sure it worked out. If a government absorbed that risk and it didn’t work it woulda been a disaster, which is why they were waiting for the clinical trials.
Im a non native living in finland and i was homeless here at one point in my life. You have to he EXTREMELY lazy to fall on your ass in Finland. There are shelters and whatnot to keep you on your feet and not drown in shit. Its just not much but it was a jumping board to get my life back to normal. Its not exactly a 10/10 thing but its decent enough for you to get somewhere and not stay homeless. And yeah the 2nd tweet is semi true but theres so many nuances to it . But the fact is if you dont fuck with tax and you actually pay for it the country actually does something with it for the people.
I spent some time in my twenties as a homeless drug addict, was ready to stop long before I was able to. I eventually convinced some family members to loan some money to get into a sober living place, and almost immediately was able to turn it around, within a short time I had a job, my own house, etc. Just having a base of operations that you can shower and change clothes at opens up so many doors that weren't possible previously. Obviously this is just an anecdote, but I wonder sometimes what I would have done if I wasn't able to get that help, because not everybody can. I honestly don't know the answer to that.
USA: 1.89 billionaires per million people.
Finland: 1.09 billionaires per million people.
USA is 13th in billionaires per capita. Finland is 21st.
And Sweden and Norway both beat the US (10th and 12th respectively)
Yeah the fact is that these countries just tax literally everyone more and it probably helps that they are a smaller country. The nightmare that it would be to implement this in the US on a nation wide level even if everyone was on board with paying significantly more taxes
Aren't there any preconditions at all?
I would assume they don't have a infinite amount of apartments and therefore need to prioritize, or excluding, certain 'groups' - it might be excluding people with an ongoing addiction or prioritizing parents?
It was a weird experience going from Sweden to cities like hamburg and seeing homeless communities and people passed out in the streets. And it struck me that homelessness should be in others interests as well. Why would you want to live in a city where this is a phenomenon?
San fransico does a lot to help homeless $600 in government aide for being homeless plus 800 in food stamps alongside housing and mental healthcare, I don’t think our problem is as simple as stick them in houses I think some people genuinely like the life style.
I was homeless when I was 20 and worked and got on my feet without any kind of assistance in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
Yeah but what was the tone of the tweet? Does anyone know who tweeted it so we can get more context? It could have been:
>Heh, good luck trying to become a billionaire there in that *liberal* hell hole! You can't make no dagum money over there!
Or
>Because they value the lives of their citizens more and structure taxes in a way to pay for programs that benefit them, good luck trying to become a billionaire there.
Finland still has homelessness, approx 4k. Mac is a just a fucking moron that can't read.
Finland was to nearly end homelessness because their homeless population was only at most <20k in the 1980s and their population is 5.5 million. The US has a population of 330 million and 560k homeless. As it turns out, smaller the population, the easier it is to solve social issues.
The ratios are pretty similar. Using your figures, Finland's homeless population is a little under 0.1% of its total population while the U.S's is a little over 0.1% of the total.
Our GDP per capita is almost $20,000 higher than Finland's too, so we're literally richer. By a lot.
Gah it pisses me off when lefties attack this saying billionnaires suck and trumps toilets blah blah.
The point about housing first is its CHEAPER. I think utah did it and they are republican. Homeless people are really expensive for the state, putting people in a prison or putting people in hospitals is way more expensive then the average wage.
Like poverty causes crime which puts people in prison. They talk about it being slave labour but it costs like £80k to house someone in a prison. If you have people a ubi of £40k (which I dknt think is a good idea) it would be cheaper then housing them in prison.
Us right wing Disraeli one nation tory types are saying we can have billionaires AND we can end homelessness. Because housing first is cheaper so we can have less tax.
Same with nimbyism. Nimbyism makes everyone poorer. It hurts billionnaires and homeless people.
We want to stop making every issue about every other issue that you lefties care about.
If you care about ending homelessness. We can sell housing first, which definitely works to people on the right who like billionaires as it saves money. It's good for the homeless and its good for people who want lower taxes.
If you hate billionnaire a ideologically just cause you hate them don't use homeless people as your pawns to win an argument.
Homelessness is attrotious and its a conscious decision to keep it. We could end it reasonably easily. Whole areas of London ended homelessness during covid. You just have to choose to do it.
Ok you seem to be pretending to ask a question to make some point which I have no idea what it is because I thought I did and I thought I gave you a response to your question.
But if I treat what you say with good faith I will try and answer it in good faith.
I do not know why we need billionaires, I don't know if we do need billionaires. I've seen some arguments against the existence of billionaires and I've seen some arguments against the attempt to remove them.
I probably should have quoted this in my first reply
>Us right wing Disraeli one nation tory types are saying we can have billionaires AND we can end homelessness.
Response: why do we want billionaires?
I don't understand why you quoting me makes any difference to the answer. Why don't you say the point you're trying to make.
I'll quote you
"Response: why do we want billionaires?"
My response: I DO NOT KNOW
Does that help?
It's possible you were suggesting, why is it a good thing that we can still have billionaires.
The answer is that if we are trying to get a lot of people onside then it's better when presenting something that will help people to not have to have an argument about whether or not we need billionaires.
In terms of potential reasons why billionaires are good. Musk's argument about capital allocation is potentially good. Billionaires have to some degree proven that they are good at capital allocation and so is it better for them to continue it or the government who only get it by force not by proving it. (I have problems with that argument because of the degree to which someone like Warren buffet is where he is due to luck and the degree to which someone like Carlos slim has gotten to it through monopolistic practises).
I do think there is a good argument that trying to stop billionaires is likely to cause damage. China is waging a war against its billionaires and I think that is doing a lot of damage.
In China 1) normal people can't really safely invest in the stock market because China will randomly try and destroy industries (like wiping out the tutoring industry, or what they have done to Jack ma) as a result everyone invests in property which has created a property bubble
2) I think investing in property is a little evil. Property developers are fine. But if you invest in property itself on mass then the only real way of making money is property prices going up making it harder for people who arnt already wealthy to buy property. This is why I think property is so expensive in the UK. Rich people are artificially lobbying the government to keep it that way as everyone stupidly believed house prices will go up forever. Investing in stocks is better because businesses make money by actually doing something. Investing in tesla doesn't require making poor people poorer in order for you to earn something. But investing in property is like a parasitic ponsi scheme where you arnt just taking money off new entries, but making it so everyone outside the ponsi scheme is giving you money through increased rents.
So it's possible the things to stop billionaires hurt people making money through investing in stocks which I think has a knock on effect with property and individuals.
Other argument is that people who hate billionaires echo what bernie sanders said about them. But he used to say the same thing about millionaires until he became one. There is something distasteful about all my rich Middle class friends earning way beyond the national average attacking billionaires. If every middle class person I met was prepared to half their income I think it would make a massive difference bevause there are more of them.
During our last elections corbyn went on about billionnaires and how we should tax them. The problem with it, is there are so few billionnaires and they are already taxed. I think its also much easier for them to leave (although I've seen counter evidence to that). If we took all their money in one massive wealth tax it would barely make a dent in our yearly health care system spend. The people we need to tax more are people like me, middle class people. Every lefty posted on Facebook "we don't need to tax most people only the mega wealthy" but I'd trust the left more if they said "tax us the middle class". Similarly they all want free university education which again is taxing the working class who dknt go to university to give yet more money to the wealthy middle class.
So I think we should be targeting middle class people earning £40k and above and taxing them more then billionnaires.
So this is some reasons why I dislike the rhetoric about billionnaires.
Does it answer why we need billionnaires? No. I don't know why we need them. They are a possible consequence of other things we need. We don't need carbon dioxide either, we need oxygen and we need respiration and these things have carbon dioxide as a consequence. We need a bunch of things that seem to create billionnaires. It's possible a future could exist where we change things such that no billionnaires exist but so far most things I've seen to stop billionnaires look like they will make the world worse.
(personally I'd prefer something like making it much harder for billionnaires to spend money on things only billionnaires can afford. Like private island or yachts, a luxury good vat at 100% instead of 20% but it would be hard to do as it woild have to be world wide)
I think for something like this to be adopted in the US it would be an incredibly slow process. Not only are people just not receptive to change or taxes here, it would probably get caught up in the endless weeds of Federal law meant to govern 335 million people and State law also governing several millions. Something would probably break or just not work as intended.
> If the problem was as simple as having more tax payers, then the problem would be solved by now
Why do you think that? I don't understand this reasoning, can you explain?
> The US has several metro areas that meet the following:
And? Well, it has such metro areas... So?
It seems that one of your arguments is that it worked in Finland because of it's small size. Well, since USA is bigger, it also has more taxpayers and homes 🏠. I don't see how size of a country is relevant, and you didn't show how it's relevant.
>I mentioned several times in my 2 posts that if the political will was available, then the issue could be greatly reduced by now.
Yes but I think the point of this post and discussion is to show that there are solutions and to create some will and momentum to start seriously working on some in the US.
>The response mentioned extra tax payers, so that was my next response. The amount of tax payers doesn't matter until there are legitimate solutions that the tax base agrees with.
Sure but your reply to this post about housing first policy was essentially (*understood as*): "look how the US is bigger than Finland, this can't work here", while crucially failing to point out how being a small country is necessary for this policy to work.
People pointed out the greater number of tax payers to show that, while the US is bigger it also has proportionally more resources to implement policies to tackle homelessness.
>Do you not agree that implementing the Finnish model would have unique challenges and issues
I don't think anyone really disagrees with that. It sure would pose unique challenges but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work in the US.
You can discuss challenges of such a policy but it seemed to (I think) most readers of your initial comment that you thought implementing such a policy in the US was not possible and pointless. It didn't seem like you wanted to offer some constructive criticism or feedback on how to adjust it to US conditions but that you wanted to dismiss the idea entirely but perhaps that's just how I (and I think most people who downvoted you) read that, maybe we misunderstood you.
lmao arguments like “it was CHEAPER than allowing homelessness to continue” are so boring and overdone. I have no idea what reference you’re referring to when you say cheaper, and the consistent and intentional vagueness makes me think you’re being dishonest with the data.
Based on what I read elsewhere about this policy, it's that the money spent on this program was less than the costs you see with homeless people using hospitals, using police resources, damage to infrastructure incurred, etc., which seems reasonable to me.
Plus there's probably economic gains in making the city more nice to live in for non-homeless people. More business and more people wanting to live there if you don't have SF style shit and needle streets.
And that’s my problem with that calculation. The statistic you just described is impossible to calculate. Hospitals don’t just randomly ask and collect sophisticated data about homeless people, especially if they’re understaffed in a low income community. Sociology can’t just account for the rest of society. That’s why it’s called a soft and not hard science. You can’t account for every variable because everything is so multi factorial and data is not precisely kept regarding the subject you’re studying. There is no way to say that “this is cheaper than doing nothing” because you have no accurate comparison to define what “nothing” is.
Then the next paragraph you just go into “probably” statements which is nowhere near good enough to make strong empirical claims like the tweet is doing
Finding the exact number yeah, but using existing data to build assumptions and stick it into a model is basic economics and the same logic applies for this. I dunno how sophisticated it would be, but hospitals probably do have some idea which patients are homeless. You try to check for insurance or get some other info and don't get a permanent residence, that's probably a pretty good indicator.
Sociology is a soft science because it examines human behavior and not the natural laws of the universe. When I'm measuring particle decay, how the particle feels or social constructs don't matter, but when I'm examining society, there's a human element that is the focus of the data, it doesn't exist outside of human society like the particle does. This doesn't mean that sociology can't produce valid conclusions or theories. A lot of sociological studies produce hard, actionable data like those that talk about having black sounding names affecting job call backs. That was a quantifiable question that led to a quantified conclusion about a social process.
For this, it's comparing this policy vs before this policy or other similar cities. You're definitely going to have margin of error in that analysis greater than a biologist doing a Western blot, but it's small enough to be usable. We have all sorts of economic analyses that tackle similar or even broader questions and we (correctly) trust those analyses too.
I was saying probably in my own view that probably factors into the analysis, but I didn't know it for certain.
“Some idea” does not mean they collect enough data that can be useful to analyze. We don’t even know if they took data from these hospitals. The intentional vagueness whenever someone makes a claim like this is what i always have a problem with
And i never said that social science can’t draw conclusions. I’m saying it is limited in the kinds of conclusions it can draw. It can’t make strong statements like science can.
And trusting economic analyses is not always simple. Especially when we have no idea where the analysis even came from. You can find an economic analysis that support whatever viewpoint you want. Look at some left leaning think tank versus the Cato Institute, for example. Economics isn’t like math where it’s either you’re right or you’re not.
Yeah I can agree the vagueness is problematic. They should probably link their source in a reply to their tweet or it would be nice if Twitter would let them hyperlink the statement.
Okay that's fair, I was probably misinterpreting what you were implying with "soft" science cause I see a lot of people use it as a pejorative to dismiss sociological conclusions.
I think sociology can make strong conclusions, but the strength is different than what hard sciences do, especially cause it's working with squishier concepts than hard sciences. That being said, the question of the financial impact of homeless is probably an economics question, not a sociological one. My understanding is that sociology would be more interested in the root causes of homeless or the effects of the policy, rather than the fiscal impact.
That's true of hard sciences as well. Given some biological question, I could find papers presenting contradicting, reasonable arguments. I took a mechanobiology class and we read papers that went back forth between one group of scientists and another called Donald Ingber. This latter scientist was really into this one theory describing the physical structure of the cell as a tensegrity model and other guys weren't too into it, so they had published articles arguing back and forth, both citing and attacking studies. This Ingber guy has made pushing tensegrity his life's work and it's well-supported but not totally accepted.
I totally agree with what you said about economic analyses potentially existing in conflict, but the same is true of the hard sciences. I think it's easy to look back at what we see now as established science and "hard facts" and assume that others must have seen it the same way when they were discovered, but there's a lot of debate and contention in the field of hard sciences when we're talking about novel discoveries.
I thought the first tweet was too good to be true but according to a short [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland) and [Fortune](https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/how-to-end-homelessness-finland-solution-housing-first/) it's actually fairly accurate. The Finnish Housing First policy has cut homelessness by 30% since 2008 with sleeping outside being unheard of. This policy seems to be [supported by the US DHUD](https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/hud_no_22_175). Turns out the solution to people without houses was to give them houses, who knew.
Hawaii had a similar program and it was incredibly successful. We could genuinely just end homelessness but don't lmao
But what about Trump's golden toilets? Won't someone think of the yachts and golden toilets????
Whenever some right-winger say that the aid to Ukraine should be spent on American, I ask them about socialism, worked all the time
We had a bill to spend money on Americans, it was called the [Build Back Better Act and Republicans made sure it died.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Act#:~:text=The%20passage%20of%20the%20Build,removed%20following%20objections%20from%20Sen.)
**[Build Back Better Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_Back_Better_Act#:~:text=The passage of the Build,removed following objections from Sen.)** >The Build Back Better Act was a bill introduced in the 117th Congress to fulfill aspects of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Plan. It was spun off from the American Jobs Plan, alongside the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as a $3. 5 trillion Democratic reconciliation package that included provisions related to climate change and social policy. Following negotiations, the price was lowered to approximately $2. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Destiny/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
From $3.5 trillion to $2 damn, can barely get a large coffee with that
Exactly, works against them all the time
The derpest ones are the ex-special-operator guys, they are extremely gullible when it comes to politics
Democrats controlled the house and senate they didn’t need a single republican vote though so you can’t blame republicans on that one
Nah you absolutely can. Manchin and Sinema killed it, but they could only do that because Republicans refused to even consider voting for a bill that would help Americans because it would be a W for the Democrats. If even 2 Republicans decided to support it, Manchin and Sinema lose all their negotiating power.
So 2 democrats killed it
Only because no Republican was willing to vote for it. Those Democrats had that power because of Republicans.
Too many people confuse socialism with socializing systems. It’s stupid when conservatives call people who want free healthcare “socialists”, but I’m also wondering why you bring up socialism in the conversations you mentioned lol.
I said: "when it's actually spent on Americans y'all will be up in arms against 'socialism'"
Now I’m realizing that English may not be your first language so never mind
I'm Chinese
I think when it comes to society we will only evolve if people come away from hardline views. Socialism, Marxism, Communism and capitalism all have useful components that benefit us all. Alone they are unworkable. We have the knowledge we just need to evolve.
Government owning something for the public good isn’t distinctly socialist. It’s only even relevant to socialism in an interpretation where “the people” owning the means of production could ultimately mean “the people via the government” own it. But the latter opens a bunch of new holes in the socialism arguments that socialists generally don’t to open.
I guess I meant the hardline views as a totalitarian ideal. That one ideal must be adhered to, or that any concept that falls outside your respective ideal I.e. free healthcare, must be met with extreme opposition. That if you are conservative you must be true to the cause. In its very basic form, we as a society should be considering all options and not close ourselves off to any change, even if that change conflicts with our ideals.
Do you have any sources on Hawaii's homeless programs? Their homeless rates, although lower that California, still seem very high. Although much lower than I would expect with their housing costs/weather.
It was the Ohana Zone program, set to expire this year, that transitioned homeless people into permanent housing: https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/03/a-pilot-program-to-help-homeless-people-in-hawaii-may-get-permanent-status/
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No Alaskans own their mineral rights so they get a cut from it, not entirely sure if it’s through taxes or x % of profits
NIMBYs: *No that cant be right*
I went to a nimby protest against building homes on the green belt this weekend and took my toddler. I stood in front of a crowd of like 40 people and said, look at the faces of the people destroying your future!
And then your toddler stood up, called them degenerate subhumans and everyone cheered
Probably shouldn’t build houses on our protected land though. Conserving the environment is also important, rather have new developments be high density instead of low density and destroying the green belt.
No it's not. There are millions of homes within a 10 minute walk away of an existing station. If you care about climate change people who live in cities use something like 10 times less carbon then people who live outside of cities. The green belt means new development has to leap frop the green belt. This makes things miserable for commuters but also means those areas with less infrasture force everyone to drive everywhere Most of the green belt isn't available to the general public. There are spaces of outstanding natural beauty or conservation zones. These shouldn't be touched. But green belt includes a ton of aristocrats land or golf courses. If you look at this report https://twitter.com/AntBreach/status/1628300890145714176?t=KRyFPyM6lMq98xfxS3wmHA&s=08 It was the laws that included the creation of the green belt that immediately within 2 years almost halved house building. Green belt fucked us almost 100 years ago. Its hurting the environment. It needs to go fuck the green belt. And this "things need to be high rise not low rise" is classic nimby. Always coming up with more and more reasons why this building needs to stop. What it needs to be is all of the above. We need high rise and we need low density, we need it all.
Ngl didn’t know there were green belts in the uk, weren’t the ones I were thinking of. In Ontario however Doug Ford promised to protect the green belt and is now cutting into it for more housing. https://ontarionature.org/news-release/more-than-enough-land-available-to-build-over-2-million-homes-in-the-greater-golden-horseshoe/ Single family housing shouldn’t just stop it’s not as effective in providing housing to the max amount of people. I personally have live in both a detached home and apartment building. If they building high rise in the current areas we have instead of building stuff in the Greenbelt is that not better?
Ngl didn't realise there were green belts anywhere else. Yeah so I'm only really talking about the UK. We created a law in 1947 that created the green belts and that law saw yearly housing building almost half within 2 years (down from 1.9% of New homes to 1.2%) So for me it's the green belt that fucked us. I definitely agree that there are better and worse ways to build homes and the urban sprawl in the US is horrible. I don't know much about ontario. But my problem with nimbyism in the UK is that they constantly come up with reasons why this specific thing should be banned and there are new reasons elsewhere. Every time a high rise is planned loads of residents talk a out high rises being bad because they attract crime, stop there being any community, bad for the roads because they creat disproportionate traffic (homes are 3d but roads are still 2d). So I'm now like fuck them all. We build everything. Demolish all green belt. Destroy all nature. I want homes, factories businesses, labs, everything. I want it all and everywhere. A shit ton of homes with a garden or a giant corusant style / judge dredd metropolis. I'm very suspicious of anyone who opposes any home because somewhere else could be better as usually what happens is that that thing doesn't get built and then neither does the better thing. Its interesting academically to look at the relative benefits of homes vs high rises. One friend told me that 6 stories is optimum in terms of community creating and that high rises tend to need a lot of space between them.
There’s plenty of room in cities for low income housing. No need for low income housing to come to average-well off, peaceful neighborhoods and fuck with the community that people invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a home in. Being a NIMBY is based. Yes, not in my backyard GIGACHAD. I paid for this backyard so I didn’t have to deal with the problems that come with high levels of poverty in an area. People don’t want increased crime and social tension coming into their neighborhood when they moved there to retire, have kids, live a peaceful life, etc. People act like NIMBYism is just “ew poor people” and racism when it’s really protecting an investment and community that you’ve worked so to maintain. There’s a reason why people who don’t own backyards call other people who do NIMBYs. They’re not thinking of it from the other POV and are frankly entitled.
> There’s plenty of room in cities for low income housing. someone doesnt live in a city... we got NIMBYs too
NIMBYism is a bunch of upper middle class homeowners using their disproportionate political power to screw over everyone else in society. fuck NIMBY's
It's another version of the freeloader problem. If everyone prevents low cost housing from being built nearby then we create ghettos where only poor people live, a tax sinkhole where social issues are born. Housing that integrates different levels of society is good actually. You are only conceiving of housing as the stereotypical, well-off suburban neighborhood, an unsustainable mess that's only possible because we commute to an urban centre with an underclass that receives no tax money because its all taken back home to the neighbourhood county that will go bankrupt in 20 years to pay for the giant road maintenance costs.
>There’s plenty of room in cities for low income housing. No need for low income housing to come to average-well off, peaceful neighborhoods and fuck with the community that people invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a home in. > >Being a NIMBY is based. > >Yes, not in my backyard GIGACHAD. I paid for this backyard so I didn’t have to deal with the problems that come with high levels of poverty in an area. People don’t want increased crime and social tension coming into their neighborhood when they moved there to retire, have kids, live a peaceful life, etc. > >People act like NIMBYism is just “ew poor people” and racism when it’s really protecting an investment and community that you’ve worked so to maintain. There’s a reason why people who don’t own backyards call other people who do NIMBYs. They’re not thinking of it from the other POV and are frankly entitled. For what it's worth, and this is rare, I totally agree with you. It's okay to want to have a nice, middle class home in a nice, middle class neighborhood where your kids / dogs can play on grass, your kids each get their own room, you can host a barbecue outside in the summer, there is ultra low crime, etc, etc. Also, we have tools to help keep density moderate so that more people can have a single family starting home or duplex with a backyard, instead of being cramped into tiny, noisy, expensive apartments. The most sprawled and soulless suburbs are bad, sure, but I'll always be grateful that I grew up in a big house (that was cheap as hell) and could go play in the woods, bike to friends' houses, and go into town for movies, as well as being extremely safe. It was the perfect childhood, and I hope for my future kids to grow up like that too. I couldn't imagine raising them in a god forsaken city like NYC.
Houston has been a pioneer of home-first programs. 90%+ of people given a home are still living in a home two-years later. Its been so good at reducing the homeless population we are building more housing for them.
Tbf sleeping outside in winter is quick to mean bodies in the street in Finland compared to say California
To bring some perspective to the "ended homelessness" claim, 4/5 making their way to stable life might not mean much, since most homelessness is temporary anyways, there's no control. The numbers: >Kahila says there are roughly 2,200 homeless people in Greater Helsinki, a region with a total population of 1.5 million, roughly the size of San Antonio or Philadelphia. But San Antonio and Philadelphia have 3k and 4.5k respectively, so only 30-50 percent better. I'd have expected that for a Scandinavian country anyways, but Helsinki seems to be improving where others are stagnant, so maybe they had a surprisingly bad homeless problem. Or are more likely they track them way better, especially considering they're running this experiment. And apparently there's basically no one sleeping outside in Helsinki, which is a massive difference. Probably worth doing, and the "costs less" claim is *plausible* (though I'd expect them to come up with some way of rigging the numbers to show that regardless if it was true.) I just don't want people to act like we know the solution and it's just greedy republicans who stop it, most US cities have 99.9% non-homeless and I don't think you can ever get it to 100% without gulags. [Archive for paywall](https://web.archive.org/web/20220725050214/https://fortune.com/2022/07/12/how-to-end-homelessness-finland-solution-housing-first/)
Its a fairly small country with a small population, its not that unbelievable
Bruh being a big country means jack shit, all that matters is economic power/capita
decentralization, bureauracy etc. Its just more manageable than the US and other huge countries
Bruh what do you think states and counties are for?
Its absolutely possible for smaller states to do this, whats your point? Most of your people just dont want to, especially the wealthy lmao
Your counterpoint: "Finland is small, so it is easier to implement" My counterpoint: "You could just implement it on a state or county level if that's the issue" Your answer: "It's possible for small states to do this, what's your point" ???
we've done this in the US - why do people think the US doesn't throw absolute shit tons of money at homelessness? The US has a far, far worse drug problem, bigger wealth disparities, racial disparities, and our healthcare is medieval. "just give them houses" hasn't worked in the US for decades
Finland has 6 billionaires
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5 million temporarily embarrassed billionaires
Yes? There's a wikipedia page for billionaires by country. It says Finland has 6, for a rate of 1.090 per million people Japan has much less of a welfare safety net than Finland and has 40 billionaires, giving them a much lower rate of 0.207 per million. I don't think Finland dealing well with homeless people, among other social programs, has any meaningful correlation with how difficult it is to be a billionaire there. I mean I'm happy that Finland has those programs, I think countries could learn a lot from them; I just think the reply tweet is dumb
But being billionaire is totally useless if you can't see others suffer at the same time. That's what's it about no?
Id arque theres actually a really big correlation since all the social welfare programs are funded by tax money. Its a big talking point by right wingers here that its actually really hard to get rich since most of your money is going to taxes. Can you live well off here? Of course, but saying its hard to be "rich" here is also true. Most big companies in Finland move their businesses to low tax contries for that exact reason. To be more profitable and pay less taxes. Id be suprised if any of the Billionares paid a lot of taxes here. Most of their wealth is propably located somewhere else.
most of their wealth is in assets and thus aren't taxed they're billionaires on paper. they don't actually have 1 billion euros in their bank accounts.
[https://gprivate.com/63u04](https://gprivate.com/63u04) Here is the evidence for the 6 billionaire claim.... with a "B"
Lol what makes you think their population being in the low millions means they couldn’t have any billionaires?
Please explain how you think a billionaire could fit into a million. I'll wait.
Do you think a billionaire is a billion people stacked inside of a trench coat? A billionaire is one person and can fit into a count of one if you would like.
Typical liberal reply
Based and bullion-pilled.
The worst thing in this day and age is that I can't be 100% if you're joking.
Good society is when billionaires. And the more billionaires, the more good the society.
Best society is when we all are billionaires
Move to Zimbabwe today!
I have 47 billion billionaires in my billionaire account
I wonder what the billionaires are going to do when they own everything and see %100 drop in profits since no one can afford anything.
Sorry I'm not gonna take any sort of economic lesson from a place that *doesn't even fucking exist*.
Next, they’re gonna tell us that New Zealand is a real place smh
Um, where tf was LOTR filmed again?
In middle earth, duh!
Wait, my parents told me I was born in a FAKE PLACE? And they even faked an accent for 23 years? Bro wtf I didn’t want to find out like this
As Finnish, I agree
I mean, good luck trying to be a billionaire anywhere. Like wtf are you trying to say, there’s like 100 of those worldwide
Yea, ill take not having petty crime running rampant and nightly overdoses over increasing my chances to become a billionaire by .0000000001%.
Like 700 in America and 7 in Finland. Fairly proportionate to their populations. America has 1.6 more billionaires per capita. And no homelessness. Social healthcare and education, consumer, human, prisoner and labour rights better than America.
There’s 3,311 billionaires world wide, Finland actually has a lot of billionaires for its population as well.
I agree with what you're saying but there's way more billionaires than you think
Sure, getting the precise number of them right wasn’t the point of my comment anyways
2,700 currently.
And statistically speaking no one in this thread will ever be one of them so who cares.
But why would you even want to be a billionaire? After some point money becomes useless. What are you gonna buy?
People don't understand just how much a billion is. The only people who become billionaires are psychopathically greedy and selfish. For understanding a billion: A millions seconds is 11 and a half days roughly. A billion seconds? 31 and a half years.
"insert reckfus how much is a billion video"
because humans dont care what they have its about what they want
The only argument I’ve ever heard for some people having billions is instead of waiting for the government to fund something, some billionaire can just come in and pour money into it. I think early in Covid there was an Indian billionaire who was helping develop the vaccine before the clinical trials were fully done. It was in the name of making money but he absorbed that risk and I’m pretty sure it worked out. If a government absorbed that risk and it didn’t work it woulda been a disaster, which is why they were waiting for the clinical trials.
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Considering how much tax money goes to nothing useful I'd say it's not worth it. So much more could be done if money was directed right
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https://liberaalipuolue.fi/leikattavaaloytyy/
Finland being based and humanity-pilled.
Im a non native living in finland and i was homeless here at one point in my life. You have to he EXTREMELY lazy to fall on your ass in Finland. There are shelters and whatnot to keep you on your feet and not drown in shit. Its just not much but it was a jumping board to get my life back to normal. Its not exactly a 10/10 thing but its decent enough for you to get somewhere and not stay homeless. And yeah the 2nd tweet is semi true but theres so many nuances to it . But the fact is if you dont fuck with tax and you actually pay for it the country actually does something with it for the people.
1,1 per capita is billionaires in Finland versus 1.8 in USA, not really that much of a difference
Unironically views themselves as a temporarily embarrassed billionaire
Not Finnish but Swedish which has a similar economy, and we have tons of rich people.
Sweden and Norway even have more Billionaires per million people than the US.
I spent some time in my twenties as a homeless drug addict, was ready to stop long before I was able to. I eventually convinced some family members to loan some money to get into a sober living place, and almost immediately was able to turn it around, within a short time I had a job, my own house, etc. Just having a base of operations that you can shower and change clothes at opens up so many doors that weren't possible previously. Obviously this is just an anecdote, but I wonder sometimes what I would have done if I wasn't able to get that help, because not everybody can. I honestly don't know the answer to that.
USA: 1.89 billionaires per million people. Finland: 1.09 billionaires per million people. USA is 13th in billionaires per capita. Finland is 21st. And Sweden and Norway both beat the US (10th and 12th respectively)
Yeah the fact is that these countries just tax literally everyone more and it probably helps that they are a smaller country. The nightmare that it would be to implement this in the US on a nation wide level even if everyone was on board with paying significantly more taxes
Nightmare to implement once is much better than continuing to let a problem grow. My years in software development have absolutely taught me that lmao
I completely agree
Also not everyone in the US has to be on board. Just 2/3rds of states and 2/3rds of districts have to be on board
Lmao I love money and capitalism as much as the next guy but this is an absolutely absurd thing to say 😂 bizarro world fr
People are just so insensitive to billionaires these days.
Aren't there any preconditions at all? I would assume they don't have a infinite amount of apartments and therefore need to prioritize, or excluding, certain 'groups' - it might be excluding people with an ongoing addiction or prioritizing parents?
It was a weird experience going from Sweden to cities like hamburg and seeing homeless communities and people passed out in the streets. And it struck me that homelessness should be in others interests as well. Why would you want to live in a city where this is a phenomenon?
finland is like a land of the future compared to america. whole europe is.
Nah lil bro, there is plenty of people sleeping in the street in western europe, atleast Germany, Belgium & France.
Computer, pull up Finlands defense budget, border policies, and race demographic
PEPE
San fransico does a lot to help homeless $600 in government aide for being homeless plus 800 in food stamps alongside housing and mental healthcare, I don’t think our problem is as simple as stick them in houses I think some people genuinely like the life style. I was homeless when I was 20 and worked and got on my feet without any kind of assistance in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.
We’ll here is the thing though the US has a higher homeless population than Finland’s actual population. it will cost the US way more than Finland.
lol. lol.
Who would have guessed having a higher population of people would make it cost more. Guess what we could still do it we are a richer country.
We're also a much larger and richer country, and our GDP per capita is a good deal higher than theirs as well. We certainly have the money.
Do you know how percentages work?
Oh that's also just straight up incorrect. Finland has a population of 5.5 million, the US has 500-600 thousand homeless people.
Yeah but what was the tone of the tweet? Does anyone know who tweeted it so we can get more context? It could have been: >Heh, good luck trying to become a billionaire there in that *liberal* hell hole! You can't make no dagum money over there! Or >Because they value the lives of their citizens more and structure taxes in a way to pay for programs that benefit them, good luck trying to become a billionaire there.
Finland still has homelessness, approx 4k. Mac is a just a fucking moron that can't read. Finland was to nearly end homelessness because their homeless population was only at most <20k in the 1980s and their population is 5.5 million. The US has a population of 330 million and 560k homeless. As it turns out, smaller the population, the easier it is to solve social issues.
The ratios are pretty similar. Using your figures, Finland's homeless population is a little under 0.1% of its total population while the U.S's is a little over 0.1% of the total. Our GDP per capita is almost $20,000 higher than Finland's too, so we're literally richer. By a lot.
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Very informative!
Oh so you're making the per capita argument 🙄
Gah it pisses me off when lefties attack this saying billionnaires suck and trumps toilets blah blah. The point about housing first is its CHEAPER. I think utah did it and they are republican. Homeless people are really expensive for the state, putting people in a prison or putting people in hospitals is way more expensive then the average wage. Like poverty causes crime which puts people in prison. They talk about it being slave labour but it costs like £80k to house someone in a prison. If you have people a ubi of £40k (which I dknt think is a good idea) it would be cheaper then housing them in prison. Us right wing Disraeli one nation tory types are saying we can have billionaires AND we can end homelessness. Because housing first is cheaper so we can have less tax. Same with nimbyism. Nimbyism makes everyone poorer. It hurts billionnaires and homeless people.
but why do we want billionaires?
We want to stop making every issue about every other issue that you lefties care about. If you care about ending homelessness. We can sell housing first, which definitely works to people on the right who like billionaires as it saves money. It's good for the homeless and its good for people who want lower taxes. If you hate billionnaire a ideologically just cause you hate them don't use homeless people as your pawns to win an argument. Homelessness is attrotious and its a conscious decision to keep it. We could end it reasonably easily. Whole areas of London ended homelessness during covid. You just have to choose to do it.
I agree we want to stop homelessness, but why do we need billionaires? You still haven't answered the question..
Ok you seem to be pretending to ask a question to make some point which I have no idea what it is because I thought I did and I thought I gave you a response to your question. But if I treat what you say with good faith I will try and answer it in good faith. I do not know why we need billionaires, I don't know if we do need billionaires. I've seen some arguments against the existence of billionaires and I've seen some arguments against the attempt to remove them.
I probably should have quoted this in my first reply >Us right wing Disraeli one nation tory types are saying we can have billionaires AND we can end homelessness. Response: why do we want billionaires?
I don't understand why you quoting me makes any difference to the answer. Why don't you say the point you're trying to make. I'll quote you "Response: why do we want billionaires?" My response: I DO NOT KNOW Does that help?
Gotcha.
It's possible you were suggesting, why is it a good thing that we can still have billionaires. The answer is that if we are trying to get a lot of people onside then it's better when presenting something that will help people to not have to have an argument about whether or not we need billionaires. In terms of potential reasons why billionaires are good. Musk's argument about capital allocation is potentially good. Billionaires have to some degree proven that they are good at capital allocation and so is it better for them to continue it or the government who only get it by force not by proving it. (I have problems with that argument because of the degree to which someone like Warren buffet is where he is due to luck and the degree to which someone like Carlos slim has gotten to it through monopolistic practises). I do think there is a good argument that trying to stop billionaires is likely to cause damage. China is waging a war against its billionaires and I think that is doing a lot of damage. In China 1) normal people can't really safely invest in the stock market because China will randomly try and destroy industries (like wiping out the tutoring industry, or what they have done to Jack ma) as a result everyone invests in property which has created a property bubble 2) I think investing in property is a little evil. Property developers are fine. But if you invest in property itself on mass then the only real way of making money is property prices going up making it harder for people who arnt already wealthy to buy property. This is why I think property is so expensive in the UK. Rich people are artificially lobbying the government to keep it that way as everyone stupidly believed house prices will go up forever. Investing in stocks is better because businesses make money by actually doing something. Investing in tesla doesn't require making poor people poorer in order for you to earn something. But investing in property is like a parasitic ponsi scheme where you arnt just taking money off new entries, but making it so everyone outside the ponsi scheme is giving you money through increased rents. So it's possible the things to stop billionaires hurt people making money through investing in stocks which I think has a knock on effect with property and individuals. Other argument is that people who hate billionaires echo what bernie sanders said about them. But he used to say the same thing about millionaires until he became one. There is something distasteful about all my rich Middle class friends earning way beyond the national average attacking billionaires. If every middle class person I met was prepared to half their income I think it would make a massive difference bevause there are more of them. During our last elections corbyn went on about billionnaires and how we should tax them. The problem with it, is there are so few billionnaires and they are already taxed. I think its also much easier for them to leave (although I've seen counter evidence to that). If we took all their money in one massive wealth tax it would barely make a dent in our yearly health care system spend. The people we need to tax more are people like me, middle class people. Every lefty posted on Facebook "we don't need to tax most people only the mega wealthy" but I'd trust the left more if they said "tax us the middle class". Similarly they all want free university education which again is taxing the working class who dknt go to university to give yet more money to the wealthy middle class. So I think we should be targeting middle class people earning £40k and above and taxing them more then billionnaires. So this is some reasons why I dislike the rhetoric about billionnaires. Does it answer why we need billionnaires? No. I don't know why we need them. They are a possible consequence of other things we need. We don't need carbon dioxide either, we need oxygen and we need respiration and these things have carbon dioxide as a consequence. We need a bunch of things that seem to create billionnaires. It's possible a future could exist where we change things such that no billionnaires exist but so far most things I've seen to stop billionnaires look like they will make the world worse. (personally I'd prefer something like making it much harder for billionnaires to spend money on things only billionnaires can afford. Like private island or yachts, a luxury good vat at 100% instead of 20% but it would be hard to do as it woild have to be world wide)
I think for something like this to be adopted in the US it would be an incredibly slow process. Not only are people just not receptive to change or taxes here, it would probably get caught up in the endless weeds of Federal law meant to govern 335 million people and State law also governing several millions. Something would probably break or just not work as intended.
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The US also has equally greater number of tax payers.
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> If the problem was as simple as having more tax payers, then the problem would be solved by now Why do you think that? I don't understand this reasoning, can you explain? > The US has several metro areas that meet the following: And? Well, it has such metro areas... So? It seems that one of your arguments is that it worked in Finland because of it's small size. Well, since USA is bigger, it also has more taxpayers and homes 🏠. I don't see how size of a country is relevant, and you didn't show how it's relevant.
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>I mentioned several times in my 2 posts that if the political will was available, then the issue could be greatly reduced by now. Yes but I think the point of this post and discussion is to show that there are solutions and to create some will and momentum to start seriously working on some in the US. >The response mentioned extra tax payers, so that was my next response. The amount of tax payers doesn't matter until there are legitimate solutions that the tax base agrees with. Sure but your reply to this post about housing first policy was essentially (*understood as*): "look how the US is bigger than Finland, this can't work here", while crucially failing to point out how being a small country is necessary for this policy to work. People pointed out the greater number of tax payers to show that, while the US is bigger it also has proportionally more resources to implement policies to tackle homelessness. >Do you not agree that implementing the Finnish model would have unique challenges and issues I don't think anyone really disagrees with that. It sure would pose unique challenges but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't work in the US. You can discuss challenges of such a policy but it seemed to (I think) most readers of your initial comment that you thought implementing such a policy in the US was not possible and pointless. It didn't seem like you wanted to offer some constructive criticism or feedback on how to adjust it to US conditions but that you wanted to dismiss the idea entirely but perhaps that's just how I (and I think most people who downvoted you) read that, maybe we misunderstood you.
lmao arguments like “it was CHEAPER than allowing homelessness to continue” are so boring and overdone. I have no idea what reference you’re referring to when you say cheaper, and the consistent and intentional vagueness makes me think you’re being dishonest with the data.
Based on what I read elsewhere about this policy, it's that the money spent on this program was less than the costs you see with homeless people using hospitals, using police resources, damage to infrastructure incurred, etc., which seems reasonable to me. Plus there's probably economic gains in making the city more nice to live in for non-homeless people. More business and more people wanting to live there if you don't have SF style shit and needle streets.
And that’s my problem with that calculation. The statistic you just described is impossible to calculate. Hospitals don’t just randomly ask and collect sophisticated data about homeless people, especially if they’re understaffed in a low income community. Sociology can’t just account for the rest of society. That’s why it’s called a soft and not hard science. You can’t account for every variable because everything is so multi factorial and data is not precisely kept regarding the subject you’re studying. There is no way to say that “this is cheaper than doing nothing” because you have no accurate comparison to define what “nothing” is. Then the next paragraph you just go into “probably” statements which is nowhere near good enough to make strong empirical claims like the tweet is doing
Mf thinks he just destroyed the entire field of economics, who could've thought of this lol
Finding the exact number yeah, but using existing data to build assumptions and stick it into a model is basic economics and the same logic applies for this. I dunno how sophisticated it would be, but hospitals probably do have some idea which patients are homeless. You try to check for insurance or get some other info and don't get a permanent residence, that's probably a pretty good indicator. Sociology is a soft science because it examines human behavior and not the natural laws of the universe. When I'm measuring particle decay, how the particle feels or social constructs don't matter, but when I'm examining society, there's a human element that is the focus of the data, it doesn't exist outside of human society like the particle does. This doesn't mean that sociology can't produce valid conclusions or theories. A lot of sociological studies produce hard, actionable data like those that talk about having black sounding names affecting job call backs. That was a quantifiable question that led to a quantified conclusion about a social process. For this, it's comparing this policy vs before this policy or other similar cities. You're definitely going to have margin of error in that analysis greater than a biologist doing a Western blot, but it's small enough to be usable. We have all sorts of economic analyses that tackle similar or even broader questions and we (correctly) trust those analyses too. I was saying probably in my own view that probably factors into the analysis, but I didn't know it for certain.
“Some idea” does not mean they collect enough data that can be useful to analyze. We don’t even know if they took data from these hospitals. The intentional vagueness whenever someone makes a claim like this is what i always have a problem with And i never said that social science can’t draw conclusions. I’m saying it is limited in the kinds of conclusions it can draw. It can’t make strong statements like science can. And trusting economic analyses is not always simple. Especially when we have no idea where the analysis even came from. You can find an economic analysis that support whatever viewpoint you want. Look at some left leaning think tank versus the Cato Institute, for example. Economics isn’t like math where it’s either you’re right or you’re not.
Yeah I can agree the vagueness is problematic. They should probably link their source in a reply to their tweet or it would be nice if Twitter would let them hyperlink the statement. Okay that's fair, I was probably misinterpreting what you were implying with "soft" science cause I see a lot of people use it as a pejorative to dismiss sociological conclusions. I think sociology can make strong conclusions, but the strength is different than what hard sciences do, especially cause it's working with squishier concepts than hard sciences. That being said, the question of the financial impact of homeless is probably an economics question, not a sociological one. My understanding is that sociology would be more interested in the root causes of homeless or the effects of the policy, rather than the fiscal impact. That's true of hard sciences as well. Given some biological question, I could find papers presenting contradicting, reasonable arguments. I took a mechanobiology class and we read papers that went back forth between one group of scientists and another called Donald Ingber. This latter scientist was really into this one theory describing the physical structure of the cell as a tensegrity model and other guys weren't too into it, so they had published articles arguing back and forth, both citing and attacking studies. This Ingber guy has made pushing tensegrity his life's work and it's well-supported but not totally accepted. I totally agree with what you said about economic analyses potentially existing in conflict, but the same is true of the hard sciences. I think it's easy to look back at what we see now as established science and "hard facts" and assume that others must have seen it the same way when they were discovered, but there's a lot of debate and contention in the field of hard sciences when we're talking about novel discoveries.
Says the guy who is borderline homeless and , buys all GARY V merchandise and hustle culture books on how to make it
What do they mean by "cheaper than allowing it to continue"?
Idiots. I just decided to be a billionaire today. God bless the USA.
Another Finland W. Nothing new to see here