Musk is a moron, but if you think $20 billion could end homelessness, so are you
You’re a moron if you don’t think $20,000,000,000.00 wouldn’t raise millions of people out of homelessness and poverty.
Sure it would help significantly. It would most likely be the most successful initiative in human history. But it won’t “end homelessness”.
You don’t think ~$31,000 spent productively per every single homeless person in the US could effectively reset the homeless crisis?
Sure it would help significantly. It would most likely be the most successful initiative in human history. But it won’t “end homelessness”.
I feel like that’s pedantry on whether the definition of “end homelessness” means, 0 homeless forever vs, homelessness is a small, manageable problem again.
And if say, half of that 20 billion were put in a perpetual trust it could give a perpetual budget of 100s of millions of dollars to fund maintenance and social work staff to continue to better manage the problem.
He isn’t a moron, he’s just a narcissistic sociopath. Musk is no different than you at the yolk of a WWII bomber. He has no idea what he’s doing.
But in his element, he’s dangerous and does very well know what he’s doing.
Musk doesn’t care about the homeless. He cares about their labor and how much he and his buddies can get it for free. If being homeless and sleeping in your car is suddenly illegal nationwide, then many of us will be forced into rents we don’t want to pay or end up in Musk’s labor camp with the rest of their undesirables.
It was never about helping anyone.
San Francisco spends (very roughly) $100,000 a year per homeless person and that doesn’t “end homelessness” there. It doesn’t even come close. These dollar estimates are all unrealistic because the issue is generally not that there’s insufficient funding. It’s that the sort of person who is homeless long-term is often not the sort of person who would want to be housed in any housing that the government could reasonably provide.
Here in NYC there was controversy because the city government was telling some homeless people that they could choose between going to a shelter or being arrested but they couldn’t remain camped where they were. If you want to end homelessness, you can’t just build housing. You have to force these homeless people to live in it. Are you willing to do that?
Be careful. Lemmy hates it when you point out that not all homeless people are those temporarily down on their luck.
Yeah. What I do when I’m out walking downtown, I carry a special measuring stick. Just wave it near a homeless person to calculate the value of their life. It’s the basic version, so it’s missing the autoeuthanize features, but it does make me feel better about myself just to have it.
I have no idea what you’re talking about.
There are actually two separate homeless issues. The first is a lack of services for people who just need a little help getting back on their feet. In this case, temporary housing is a way to treat the issue.
But, the second homeless issue is way more complex. The chronically homeless aren’t just people who are down on their luck. They’re people with severe mental illness, drug addiction, or both. Some people straight up don’t want to be part of society at all. For those people, throwing housing at them isn’t going to be an end to their situation.
the sort of housing that government could relatively provide.
The sort of housing the government is willing to provide.
choose between going to a shelter or being arrested but they couldn’t remain camping
Given the a choice between restricted temporary housing or imprisonment, it’s no wonder someone would choose independent living on one’s own terms. People need support for independent living not being forced into a soulless shelter room shared with strangers and a dictated schedule, where they can’t bring their children, pets, or dependent substances. It’s the same reason folks dread being shuttled off to a nursing home.
It would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in America.
Bullshit. Hope you guys don’t seriously believe this.
Edit: it really underscores the mentality of the community when a straightforward debunking of a false statement has a negative score, lol.
The billionaires of this country could spend 20B a year, every year of their lives, and never run out of money.
Politifact isn’t the end all of fact checking. 20B is in fact the widely cited figure for yearly housing costs if we just paid rent for all homeless people.
What does it matter about the exact dollar amount? The top 3 wealthiest people in the US could provide housing, sanitation and food for every single homeless person in the US and still be multi-billionaires. It doesn’t matter if the cost of tackling homelessness is $20bn or $200bn, it’s still a fact that a handful of people hoarde enough wealth that they could actually pay to house every single homeless person, and still have millions (if not billions) left over.
Yes, this is a trite example and doesn’t address the systemic failures in healthcare and education that are a major factor in people becoming homeless. But the wealth the ultra-rich hoarde could help with that too.
What does it matter about the exact dollar amount?
If it’s an amount that exceeds the means of the person you’re complaining isn’t paying for it, it’s pretty relevant, don’t you think?
The top 3 wealthiest people in the US could provide housing, sanitation and food for every single homeless person in the US and still be multi-billionaires.
This is literally false. The combined total net worth of the three richest in the US (~$800 billion) is less than the US government spends on welfare EVERY YEAR (over $1 TRILLION), lol.
Hell, even that nonsensical $20 billion figure put forth was ANNUAL, not one-time, so even IF we used that figure for the sake of argument, and even IF you could wave a magic wand and convert all of Musk’s net worth straight into cash 1:1, it STILL would barely last 10 years. Then what?
You have no idea of the magnitude of the cost of solving this problem. Stop writing as if you know what you’re talking about when you obviously don’t.
You uhh aren’t doing yourself any favors trying to compare the entirety of welfare to a fraction of what welfare does and yes an annual 20B is affordable on a national level. Elon’s wealth jumped 170B just since November. He could absolutely afford 20B a year.
Fuck Elon, but also there’s absolutely zero chance you can solve homelessness with $20b unless you’re just building tent cities with no other resources available there.
20 billion could house and feed our entire homeless population for twenty years. While that would not solve the problem, it would drastically improve their lives.
I don’t really believe that. It cost us $10 billion just to provide free lunches to kids for a year during covid. I think we should spend that every year. But the cost of housing is much higher unless you’re planning housing with no HVAC or energy costs. Even if that number were theoretically real, it clearly isn’t accounting for inflation, or the potential increase in homeless population when they start providing free housing.
You don’t have to believe it, good lord!
650,000 homeless people times one thousand in rent for twenty years.
650000 x $1,000 x 20 years = $13 billion. That leaves enough left over to also feed them for 20 years as well
Do you believe it now!? Don’t answer that, because it is clear you have a serious case of learned helplessness.
Edit:
650,000 x 12 x $1,000 x 2.5 years of rent with no food. Buuuut Elon gained 50 billion so that would be over 5 years with food. He could house every homeless person and feed them with the money he made since the election.
I mean…you could really build rather modest dormitories outside of cities for not much money. Throw free bus rides into and out of the city (where jobs and social resources are) at it, and you’ve got not a solution, but a pretty damn good bandage to help people and families get (back) on their feet.
Hell, rent them on a sliding scale if so inclined. But the scale has to be $0 up until a decent income, like at least the first quintile.
That assumtion is an annual cost. Although doing it for one year only would still probably reduce the homeless numbers considerably.
https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/1/16/what-would-it-cost-to-end-homelessness-in-america
Homelessnes is not a problem you can solve with any amount of money.
Ironically, no, it wouldn’t. At least not longterm. I know many people on lemmy don’t want to hear that because capitalism bad or something, but it’s the reality. Do you unironically think you can just give every homeless person a home and it would all magically sort itself out? Most likely not. Homes need to be maintained, which cost money.
In order to “solve” homelessness, you need to give people the ability to fix their lives themselves. It reminds me a lot of the attempts to help africa back in the early 2000s when europe would send a lot of heavy machinery to africa to help them improve farming, but they couldn’t properly maintain or use the machinery because they didn’t have the technical knowledge or the machinery simply wasn’t suitable, so they just left them to rust or dismantled them for parts and quick money. Instead, europe moved to an approach that would enable those people to help themselves by providing better education etc.
Just giving people free housing will not work unless you also come up with a plan to maintain said housing, which costs money, which has to be paid for. If you don’t have a plan like that in place, you will probably create a highly criminal slum within a couple of months, if not weeks.
I dislike musk and most stock-market-billionaires as much as most people on here, but pretending we can just take all their wealth away and the entire world would be a beautiful place where everyone can live happy and it smells like butterscotch-pie everywhere is just an extremely immature take.
