Direct cash is not without problems. Theft, mismanagement, exploitation, violence are all known issue of just throwing money at people.
I’ll admit the administrative costs are low compared to no/low income housing or food assistance.
But this can be a be careful of what you wish for type of thing. A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash. I know from my time working with a local shelter.
The question isn't wether there are problems with direct cash, but rather if it has fewer problems than existing systems, which this study finds evidence of.
The political problem of direct cash transfers is that people find them odious. Money is earned and should not be given, but food can be. This is incredibly illogical but it's our political reality, one that can hopefully be changed.
This is on top of already existing systems though. I don't think many people ever doubted that giving everyone an extra $12k per year or whatever made out of thin air would help some people, but in real life, the money has to come from somewhere. Plenty of people don't want to pay the increase in taxes that would be necessary to help the homeless publicly like that. Many people believe that more targeted spending is a more efficient and possibly a more effective way to help the homeless. Converting current public aid to just cash payments would probably be less effective.
It's not illogical to prefer giving food and housing to cash. Somewhere around a third of homeless people are addicted to drugs or alcohol. Many have mental problems or just very bad financial skills. Many don't have a way to keep that money safe. If you give homeless people money, there's a very good chance it'll be blown on drugs, booze, or lotto tickets or just stolen. Some people it will help; some it won't. Whereas if you take that same increase in funding proposed and instead, say, expand housing programs, fund food banks, or provide mental health treatment, you know all that money is going to help people. Plus it can help people in ways that they may not help themselves otherwise.
> It's not illogical to prefer giving food and housing to cash.
It's not inherently logical either. Your assertion that indirect funding is somehow more effective is unproven. If you want to be strictly logical about it, you decide up front what the actual goals are, and you try and find the most cost effective way to reach them.
It may be counterintuitive, but it's entirely plausible that on the whole direct funding is more effective. There is at least some good evidence pointing this way in some areas. If you dig into any of this stuff in any real depth, you'll find that the "common sense" solutions are often wrongheaded for non obvious ways.
Further: breaking the world into "normal folks" and "homeless people incapable of managing their finances" is far too reductive. There certainly are people whose addictions or mental health issues or whatever make it difficult for them to manage their own finances, but that is a small fraction of the people who rely on some sort of public assistance.
> I don't think many people ever doubted that giving everyone an extra $12k per year or whatever made out of thin air would help some people, but in real life, the money has to come from somewhere.
No, in real life money (especially in a country whose debt is denominated in currency it controls) is, almost literally, just made out of thin air. There are consequences of having more money around, and sometimes it is useful to destroy some money in a different distribution to offset some of the effects of creating money that was created and distributed a particular way, but that's a different issue. (This is the relatively uncontroversial part of Modern Monetary Theory; the controversial part is the follow-up “...and, therefore, we she engage in deficit spending a lot more freely than we do now.”
The myth of the fisc (a metaphor held over from commodity money times when it was a decent repres5 of reality) is that money has to come from somewhere.
> Plenty of people don't want to pay the increase in taxes that would be necessary to help the homeless publicly like that.
The idea that taxes are necessary to pay for spending is the myth of the fisc. It's true only to the extent that the government decides it should be true. (Which, as much as people in government talk about it when opposing spending they don't like or promoting tax increases they do like, isn't all that much, hence the absence of anything approximating long-term fiscal balance.)
> Whereas if you take that same increase in funding proposed and instead, say, expand housing programs, fund food banks, or provide mental health treatment, you know all that money is going to help people.
No, you don't; waste, fraud, and abuse in selectively targeted government programs is a very, very real thing, and a lot of the money that doesn't go into waste, fraud, and abuse goes into control measures to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, instead of to the actual program purpose.
Source: more than 20 years in public sector work, the part of it that wasn't in IT specifically in fiscal management aimed at accounting for proper use of funds.
Unless you're talking about federal programs, the money is absolutely not made out of thin air. States and cities cannot print money, and most have mandatory balanced budget laws.
> A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash
Sure, that's a fair hypothesis. But studies have shown that it tends not to be true, and that direct cash assistance is actually often a remarkably effective intervention, and often more effective than other welfare programs.
The studies have generally shown that a lot of homeless people actually are prepared to just have cash.
I don't think direct cash assistance is a panacea or anything, but the data shows it is often much more effective than people expect it to be.
The studies on this are actually fairly conclusive, so if you want to push back I'd need to see solid data as pushback. Anecdotes won't really convince me otherwise on this topic, because we've had a lot of experiments that have created a pretty strong record.
A combination of direct cash assistance and mental healthcare would go a long way towards eliminating homelessness.
I have not performed the study, but suspect that in the long run this would be less costly than the current system since it's much easier to maintain mental health when you have housing. I would expect most of the participants to eventually integrate back into society and no longer be dependent on the subsidies for basic needs.
Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days.
I know it may be hard to believe, but 20-something drug addicts, the mentally ill, etc, don't exactly manage their budget as well the 40-year-old 85th percentile income earning HN programmer or 75-year-old retired school teacher.
That's not a moral judgment. It's just a fact. And to the degree it's a cultural artifact (i.e. maybe drug addicts in Sweden are veritable CFOs), a UBI won't change that overnight.
Of course not but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying. Your other objections regarding poor neighbourhoods and so on are not so much an argument against UBI as an argument against the conditions that made those neighbourhoods poor in the first place; of course those causes need to be tackled as well, but not everyone who is poor is also a drunken, sex-crazed, drug addict.
I'm not objecting to UBI, and certainly not to UBI-like experiments. Nor was SV_BubbleTime, AFAICT. But SV_BubbleTime makes a significant and important point, and a legitimate retort to the opinion, "direct cash and housing first models are absolutely the best first approaches for the unhoused".
San Francisco adopted precisely those policies 15 years ago, providing free housing and direct cash payments, and most who live in San Francisco and understand the history of the policies probably have reservations about free housing and direct cash being the "best first approaches". Even Governor Newsom, who was the mayor who did the most to accelerate and materialize those policies (e.g. ~8k housing units for the homeless have been built or converted since 2005) has admitted that those policies were incomplete and naive.
EDIT: s/15k housing units/8k housing units/. Per https://londonbreed.medium.com/homelessness-recovery-plan-40.... (Google search sucks these days so difficult to find the better sources I originally had in mind.) Note that these are units, not shelter beds. San Francisco has built more permanent housing for the homeless than the entire homeless population when the program started.
> Average weekly mortality due to illicit drug overdose was 40% higher during weeks of income assistance payments compared to weeks without payments (P<0.001). Consistent increases in mortality appeared the day after cheque disbursement and were significantly higher for two days, and marginally higher after 3 days, even when controlling for other temporal trends.
Source: "Illicit drug overdose deaths resulting from income assistance payments: Analysis of the 'check effect' using daily mortality data", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27402469/
> The findings suggest that scheduling and staffing practices of various emergency service areas in Hennepin County reflect patient load variation associated with time of welfare check distribution. Systematic variation of time or amount of welfare could lead to improved distribution and reduction of emergency services demand.
To be clear, these aren't arguments for removing or rejecting cash assistance altogether:
> The implications are that there is a general check effect and that it was not reduced by ending benefits to persons with drug and alcohol related disabilities.
> Disability payments impact the timing of substance use, but receipt of disability payments is not associated with more overall substance use than unalleviated poverty. Money management-based clinical interventions, which may involve
assignment of a representative payee, can minimize the purchase of substances with disability payments.
An example alternative model is California's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS): https://www.payingforseniorcare.com/california/inhome-suppor... On the face of it, it's a voucher program for the disabled and elderly to obtain in-home assistance (cleaning, bathing, laundry, shopping, etc). But it's actually more of a jobs program for the unemployed or underemployed able-bodied. And in cities like San Francisco a significant fraction of recipients of the vouchers are older drug addicts, and a large number of those paid with the vouchers are able-bodied older adults. There's plenty of rules violations and cheating all around (because people will be people), but arguably the money is nonetheless more well spent--e.g. less of the public expenditure is diverted to drugs--than if the program simply provided cash directly to the recipients.
Obviously, a single mother working two part-time jobs has much more to gain (as does the public) by no-strings-attached, direct cash assistance. Not all poverty looks the same, and not all of the impoverished have or even want the same incentives. That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.
> That's the point being debated and that seems to chafe people the wrong way for some reason.
It chafes because it's a common argument for doing nothing at all, or removing all agency from people in the situation. That removal of agency is absolutely a bad thing. I'd argue that people who feel they lack agency in their life are much more likely to attempt to escape that life through drug addiction.
It also grossly over-represents the number of drug addicts in the population of poor people, most of whom would just benefit from the extra money, and is used to falsely equate the two groups.
That was still a moral judgement. Welfare and UBI always have this issue in that everyone has a moral opinion on what recipients of money should spend it on.
If you have money, nobody cares what you spend it on, but if you don't have money, suddenly everyone has an opinion on what you should and shouldn't be allowed to use it for.
A moral judgment is "it is wrong to do X". It isn't a moral judgement to say "We don't want to spend our society's money subsidizing drug and alcohol addiction, we want to spend it on getting homeless people jobs, houses, etc." It isn't a moral judgment to say "we have observed that drug and alcohol addiction are harmful to the addicts and to the society we want to create, so we don't want to spend our money on that." Usually people aren't quite so precise and assume that the "we have observed ... to be harmful" is understood.
> Sources would be anyone who's grown up in a poor neighborhood. The day that government checks clear gets weird. Drug and liquor lines grow, as do those for sexual services. And of course the flurry of activity invites robbery, etc. Housing projects, for example homeless housing in SF, will ban visitors on and around those days.
Wake up wake up wake up it’s the first of the month
Get up get up get up cash your check and move on
You know those aren’t sources and sf is a local microcosm.
Your post lack humanity and nuance. Perhaps you’re jaded by your experiences which is fair but not representative.
Consistent access to sufficient money is life changing for people who grew up without. The change isn’t immediate. You don’t just suddenly adapt. You don’t unlearn the coping mechanisms you develop to survive while your poor. It takes time.
It isn't lacking humanity. I grew up poor as well. And what the poster says does indeed happen a lot. This is not to say I don't think the poor should be helped. I was helped with school grants and loans to get me to where I am today, Medicaid, and also welfare for my parents and I. So personally I know how it was, and I know how it is to have to fight that. It is hard and the poor need help for sure.
The problem of poverty can come multiple ways. One way is lack of opportunity or being in a hole you can't get out of (kids and nobody to care for them, no home, nobody to look up to, mental illness, drug addiction, health problems). But there's also people that just aren't going to do their part to help themselves either. So what we need to do is help people get out of holes to get on their feet. There's a substantial portion of people that will take that money and do exactly what the OP said.
I don’t do what I need to do to help myself most of the time. Turns out my reason might be an executive function disorder. Perhaps many of these people who don’t do their part to help them selves are actually suffering from poor mental health?
The problem is that in trying to distinguish between the two groups you'll inevitably fuck it up and ruin the lives of people who could otherwise have turned it around.
I’ll admit the administrative costs are low compared to no/low income housing or food assistance.
But this can be a be careful of what you wish for type of thing. A lot of homeless people are not prepared to just have cash. I know from my time working with a local shelter.