1. I really like Singapore's solution to welfare, it's called work-fare. Singapore only gives the homeless help if they are willing to put in work doing -- something, anything. It could be as simple as carrying a brick from one side to another for an hour. The simple fact that they have to earn their meals negates the sour taste of hand outs and yet still allows for the homeless to have a route to take to get back on their feet.
2. As a secondary note, while welfare is unfortunate, what is more unfortunate is that we spend more money on murderers than those with mental illnesses roaming our streets. It is a twisted system where doing a crime towards society is given more monetary reward than simply not being able to fit in.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, or that your point is right or wrong, but with as strong a statement as you made in point #2, you should cite references - even if only so that others can be aware of the situation.
I think the point is that it's very expensive to keep people in prison, much more so than giving a homeless person a meal. You have to provide a very solidly built, if not large, home for everyone and keep them company 24/7.
during the reagan era, many MH institutions were closed in favor of outpatient care, which largely resulted homelessness for many of the mentally ill. inmate incarceration costs are at least 25k/year -- http://www.uscourts.gov/ttb/may04ttb/costs/index.html
Are the administrators of this program really so incompetent that they can't find a useful task for people to do? Or was the brick example just hyperbole?
Work-fare programs have been attempted to varying degrees in the U.S. (not just for homeless). The trouble is things that work for city-states like Singapore, don't scale to U.S. size.
This can be said for many things Singapore does. Its quite possible these type of social services simply do not scale well and it would be best if local governments "owned" these problems as they do sewage, water, fire department, etc... But in a multi-tier government: local, state, federal, you can most always kick the problem up a level.
Suggest that the following would be better wording, as it expresses the same point without emotionally charged turns of phrase like "spend more on murderers" and "those with mental illness roaming our streets":
2. It is unfortunate that we seem willing to spend more money punishing the criminally insane than we do helping nonviolent folk with mental illness, who make up much of our homeless population.
For 5% of your start-up we fund you with a laptop and $273. It's not much, but it's enough.
It will cover your room and board and full health care benefits for 91 days. No more ramen (like other programs); eat delicious chopped beef steak with vegetables, mashed potatoes, bread, a fresh apple and cake. Demo day on the beach. Apply now!
I applied, but was rejected. It could be a strong bias against single founder companies, or that my application was written with black marker on cardboard. I fear I'll be driven towards re-enfranchisement.
You could do a series of those based on country stereo types.
The Dutch version:
IJ-Combinator, for 5% of your start-up we fund you with hijacked wifi on a laptop stolen from a parked car and E 19 per day. This lets you eat and sleep at the local Salvation Army. Free drugs on Friday, demo day in the vondelpark under the bridge at midnight. Be sure to bring your own cardboard box.
Meanwhile, Hawaiian taxpayers face a $1.2 billion budget
deficit, which is being addressed in part with deferred
state tax refunds and deferred Medicaid reimbursements.
Hawaii doesn't have a sales tax. It's a tourist destination without sales tax. How silly is that? I get so tired of these "but that's a regressive tax!" wails and nashings of teeth.
For any tourist destination, a sales tax is beautiful, because you get to tax people who don't live there. There is a danger that given two tourist destinations of equal attractiveness, the one without the sales tax may draw more tourists, but this isn't a problem for Hawaii. Where are you going to go, if you want beaches and sun and live on the west coast? Hawaii or Mexico, and there's a lot of people who go to Hawaii that wouldn't be comfortable with Mexico, so it's off the table. For Hawaii to tax their own people but not tourists seems like a strategically poor move.
A homeless program that cost $2M was not nearly as interesting to me as the fact they, of all states, had a budget deficit.
Don't we? Because every time I buy something, I pay an extra 4%. (Apparently, it's called a General Excise Tax.) An additional 6% is levied on hotel rooms as well.
You don't have a sales tax, in that the consumer is not taxed. Instead, you have an excise tax, where the business is taxed. Many businesses will show how much they inflated their prices in order to pay their excise tax, and show this as a line item on the receipt. That's their choice. That doesn't make it a sales tax.
Again, Hawaii is taxing it's own people, instead of it's tourists. In self-defense, many of those businesses pass that tax on to the tourists and itemize it on their receipts, but many don't.
"I think that we really need to begin to look at who's really homeless - not by choice and by misfortune - and who's really homeless by choice, and have a different solution for the two different populations."
And thus in a nutshell describes the moral hazard of such programs. It's just another situation of balancing a program for those in truly in need and those trying to take advantage of the system. Very difficult to define boundaries.
It's a problem with most significantly sized incentive systems, really. Large companies, for example, usually want to give employees some degree of job stability and leeway, because micromanaging someone every 5 minutes and firing people left and right really kills morale and productivity. Some people use that to game the system, and post on Slashdot (maybe even HN) all day instead of doing work. But if you swing back to the other direction, the cure might be worse than the disease.
Overall, I'd guess there are probably more salaried freeloaders than homeless freeloaders, and they make a lot more! There are places where you could do pretty much nothing in the bowels of some huge firm for 5 years and nobody would notice. And it's even easier if you do at least some work; I know plenty of people with office jobs who probably average 5 hours a week of genuine work. Of course, you might ask why homeless people don't just go get those cushy office jobs, which is an interesting/complicated question (they aren't really jobs you can apply for directly, are usually only available past a certain level of formal credential, require good bluffing, and require a certain amount of formal reliability, like showing up to work on time [even if you don't do anything there]).
I honestly believe the best way forwards is a moving economy and low minimum wage. So that the average homeless-by-choice person sees the benefits of holding down a regular job at minimum wage vs being homeless by definition. This has to be combined with affordable accomodation and transport. I really think it has to be more carrot-led rather than stick-forced, though. A certain amount of enforcement of no-sleeping is required, though, particularly in a place like Hawaii where nobody is going to die from exposure or freeze to death. Otherwise tourists are going to stop visiting and Hawaii as a whole would suffer from less income.
<snip>
Gary Phillips purchased a $400 airline ticket to Hawaii three months ago. He was homeless in San Diego for years, but is now earning cash from Hawaii's 5-cent redemption program for plastic bottles and aluminum cans.
"I recycle here," he says. "I make money doing that." Some days, over $40, he says.
</snip>
So, he collects roughly 800 recyclables a day to earn an average of $40/day. He obviously uses some of that $40 in the local economy as his social services are only costing him $3/day. He receives: "And he sleeps at the IHS shelter for $3 a day, with three free meals, $200 worth of food stamps and the state's free health care program." I'm assuming the $200 in food stamps are per month.
Perhaps this system, at least for this anecdote, is optimized. Could the state have state employees with all employee benefits doing collections of recyclables for this amount? Could the state manage a prisoner work program to collect recyclables for less? Is this homeless person taking money from someone else in the local economy that otherwise would have collected the recyclables?
It's actually been suggested (can't seem to find where I read it, though) that the bottle/can deposit fee is partly a way of increasing recycling rates by finding a clever way to pay people way below minimum wage to collect litter and separate recyclables out of trash, which would otherwise cost too much to be feasible. (Some states do have facilities that try to separate recyclables out of the general waste stream, but it's hard to do, and expensive.)
I don't know the actual numbers involved. Let's assume the recyclable deposit is $.05.
If Gary is collecting 800 improperly disposed containers (i.e. litter) per day, the argument the state is getting a good deal is valid. But I suspect the vast majority of the containers were fished out of trash recepticles. The marginal cost to the state of hauling recyclables from a trash bin to the land-fill, and the marginal cost of adding to the land-fill has got to be way below $.05. So I suspect it is not such a good deal for the state.
Generally in states that have a refund the purchase is charged to the consumer so the state isn't paying anything for the service. Of course you'd have to add in administration of the program itself, which is a relatively fixed cost independent of whether people return bottles or not.
That't right. So when the container is NOT returned, the state is in the money. The benefit to the state is when homeless pick up litter. There is no benefit in paying out a deposit for a container retrieved from a trash bin.
This seems to be a problem with not having uniform policies across the nation. I think a similar thing is happening in the European Union with its free movement but no uniform internal policies -- locations that have more generous policies attract needy from the places that don't.
I'm all for universal health coverage and making sure that people who can't find work can get support, but this is why piecemeal solutions don't work. It needs to be national.
that last little bit about distinguishing between being homeless by choice versus misfortune is just bollocks -- as someone who has been in those shoes (homeless by choice) and having met a LOT of 'homeless' people I can attest that it is ALL by choice -- sure it might be pyschologically harder for one person to bring themselves back up into 'society' if they have let rougher circumstances befall them but it's still a matter of choice -- living pro-actively instead of re-actively allows you to define your situation rather than letting it define you
Except you know, when there's mental illness, physical disease, drug addiction, or some other pretty major reason that they can't just "snap out of it".
You are right that people who don't have that kind of barrier should, and mostly do get back into society after a period of hard times. The chronic ones are homeless for a reason, and it's pretty insensitive to just say that they should live "pro-actively".
2. As a secondary note, while welfare is unfortunate, what is more unfortunate is that we spend more money on murderers than those with mental illnesses roaming our streets. It is a twisted system where doing a crime towards society is given more monetary reward than simply not being able to fit in.