A study by USC and a San Francisco-based nonprofit has found that a $750 monthly stipend improves the lives of homeless people.
If 100 homeless people were given $750 per month for a year, no questions asked, what would they spend it on?
That question was at the core of a controlled study conducted by a San Francisco-based nonprofit and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
The results were so promising that the researchers decided to publish results after only six months. The answer: food, 36.6%; housing, 19.5%; transportation, 12.7%; clothing, 11.5%; and healthcare, 6.2%, leaving only 13.6% uncategorized.
Those who got the stipend were less likely to be unsheltered after six months and able to meet more of their basic needs than a control group that got no money, and half as likely as the control group to have an episode of being unsheltered.
Multiply that by 653,000, and then ask how much you’re willing to chip in to that.
EDIT: people don’t seem to like reality sprinkled on top of their fantasy world where mere suggestions of how things SHOULD be automatically makes them so.
Sure, it would be nice to gut the defense budget to care for Americans in need. But you know we’re not doing that. So that leaves us to accept the reality of it:
It’s going to fall on taxpayers. And we’re strapped enough as it is.
So I ask again:
How much of that $5.8BN are all of you willing to chip in, k owing that we’re not selling aircraft carriers or raiding the defense budget coffers.
Right, but we live in the real world where things like that are irrelevant because no one is going to challenge it. So I task you to come up with a solution where we can solve this without having to rely on people to do the right thing.
I’ll save you some time.
There isn’t one. Taxpayers are a renewable source of income. Were the Soylent green. As long as they can make us pay for it/ there’s no need to fix anything.
Do basic math. If we are talking about $5/mo per person, that means you got $60/yr per person. 60*160M=$9.6B.
When taking taxes, 1
$10B isn't a ton of money, let alone half that. And that's just taking total tax payers at a flat rate. If you graduate it according to income, you could easily make this manageable for all persons. $5.89B is .13% of the total US tax revenue. So an additional .13% of tax revenue to help out .17% of the US population.
Also, I’m broke as fuck. So, I AM the stupid poor. I just understand how the real world works. You can’t solve this problem without dipping into fantasy suggestions.
If you want a serious answer, there are a lot of options. Closing tax loopholes for corporations, higher taxes for the wealthy, a freeze on additional military spending, stop outsourcing so much to contracted companies that blow through money for nothing (e.g. the reason why most people think government services are bad), etc. Those could all allow UBI to exist without raising taxes on the lower and middle class.
Okay? It sounds like you just don’t want an answer. Many of those changes are actually very possible if more young people start voting in elections instead of just being apathetic or having that defeatist/“realist” attitude. If you think nothing can get better ever then yeah, every solution is “fantasy.”
They’re possible, but not remotely probable. And I’d love an answer. Just one that has a remote chance of actually happening. My head isn’t in the clouds banking on wishful thinking. I’m down here on the ground, trying to keep my expectations based on reality.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but as the saying goes: