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.
That’s 0.7% of the 2023 US defence budget ($857.9B). I’d much rather have my taxes going to help people in need.
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.
And $5.8BN is a lot to come out of our taxes.