How many homeless people do you let crash on your couch and eat out of your fridge?
Or is it only ok if someone else pays for it?
The issue is that tax payers are already paying for it. It cost money for cops to go out and arrest people, then process them. The homeless person ain’t going to show up to court later, and the tax payer usually eats the cost of all that plus any anti homeless benches or windows.
I think if that the cost gets directed toward housing and food, so they have a stable place to grow from, it would be a better option in the long run.
Currently, my taxes go into destroying homeless encampments and arresting them, so we could probably use that money for housing and feeding them instead.
I know this is a classical bad faith argument and doesn’t warrant a response, but hilariously, i’ve genuinely done that before. I got to know one of those street punk types and he slept on my couch multiple times.
For what little i know of this internet stranger, i’d rather him stay at my place than you
It’s ok, I own my own home and am a functional human being, I don’t rely on hand outs from strangers to make up for an inability to behave like a person.
Or is it only ok if someone else pays for it?
We’re already paying for it. It’s cheaper (financially and otherwise) to fix the problem instead.
Do you think a town’s mayor has the ability to turn junkies and other socially unfit people into actual functional human beings?
You’ve taken the comic way too literally. Homelessness is a policy choice, and politicians are responsible for failing to allocate funds towards prevention, housing, etc. That applies to politicians at every level of government, with varying levels of responsibility/ability.
Reality is more complicated than you’re viewing it.
junkies and other socially unfit people
You don’t seem to understand what leads a person to do drugs either.
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7234816/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8
The financially wise decision is to house people, keep them fed, and in good health. Because when politicians let housing get fucked, when they let people starve, when they let them be ill, you get problems that get expensive in the form of prison time, police budgets, and crime rates. This is an area where doing the morally right thing is the most cost effective thing. Dehumanizing people as “junkies” and “socially unfit” just makes everything worse, for yourself included.