Posted on 12/31/2013 9:58:35 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
In May 2009, a small experiment involving 13 homeless men took off in London. Some of them had slept in the cold for more than 40 years. The presence of these street veterans was far from cheap. Police, legal services, health care: Each cost taxpayers thousands of pounds every year.
That spring, a local charity decided to make the street veterans — sometimes called rough sleepers — the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food-kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays. The 13 would get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. Each would receive 3,000 pounds (about $4,500), in cash, with no strings attached. The men were free to decide what to spend it on.
The only question they had to answer: What do you think is good for you?
“I didn’t have enormous expectations,” an aid worker recalled a year later. Yet the homeless men’s desires turned out to be quite modest. A phone, a passport, a dictionary — each participant had ideas about what would be best for him. None of the men wasted his money on alcohol, drugs or gambling. A year later, 11 of the 13 had roofs over their heads. (Some went to hostels; others to shelters.) They enrolled in classes, learned how to cook, got treatment for drug abuse and made plans for the future. After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, 11 vagrants moved off the streets.
The cost? About 50,000 pounds, including the wages of the aid workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Bump
Normally I would be opposed to this sort of thing, but you can’t argue with results.
The concept of free money for the poor is how we ended up with Social Security. The concept was so popular that FDR came up with the competing idea of SS so he wouldn’t have to face a primary against a popular candidate. SS was supposed to last just 10 years. (Yeah, uh-huh.)
Don’t end poverty, end welfare!!!
Free money to the poor, and free insurance money to all without insurance would cost 1/100th of all the programs we have now including Obamacare.
But, really helping the poor is NOT what liberals really want - they need them there forever for a constituency.
What they really want is two things: 1.) redistribution - take money from those who have it, and 2.) take away our freedoms and put us under government control.
That’s what it’s always been about, and the hidden reality.......
Give money to the poor, and it all ends up back in the hands of the rich within a matter of days.
That’s why the Bolsheviks understood that the only solution was to simply shoot the rich.
Takeaway line:
“The big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money.”
Yep, they actually quoted a celebrated member of academe there.
Have ya seen the British welfare class? That is what “free money” does to a people and culture.
The Japanese are an amazingly resilient people, much like Americans of a couple of generations ago. They also have a law which enables people to seek shelter in any public building in the even of disasters of this magnitude until such time as the authorities are able to provide temporary housing alternatives, such as modified shipping containers in the public parks.
We thought that the homeless (mostly winos) who haunted downtown would take advantage of the law and move to more comfortable quarters such as the hallways of the city building. But they did not.
For some reason, the preferred the convenience of downtown and street living to the shelter of city hall, just a few blocks away.
The results are refutable if the initial suppositions are called to question. Did they randomly select 13 vagrants? No they selected hardened street people... probably only males.
Taint the test sample with some teenaged girl runaways turning tricks for a bag of H, and you might get different results.
Did any of them work and earn their keep?
If you read the article, some of them took classes to become cooks. Most of them got off the street, but I think they wwere still in public housing.
I imagine a great deal of guidance and training was also involved.
I just don’t know. As a general rule if you give money for nothing, you will just keep getting more nothing. A thirteen person pilot program is one thing, an overall public policy is quite another. They have their thirteen, we have millions on publics assistance, with disastrous results.
Yup.
But I think today’s liberals are smarter than that, and know they need the rich to bash forever.......and they really don’t give a rip for the poor, for blacks, or the uninsured. It’s all a big deceit - a godless religion that makes them feel good about themselves without really doing anything good, and allows them to bash/hate those who have anything.
Jesus described today’s liberals perfectly in Luke 18:9, “And He also told this parable to certain ones WHO TRUSTED IN THEMSELVES THAT THEY WERE RIGHTEOUS, AND VIEWED OTHERS WITH CONTEMPT.”
OK, so did any new vagrants replace them, or are there now eleven less and a similar program will reduce the number even further, ending with zero vagrants on the street.
Important because if ya have a net increase, then the program will eventually bankrupt the nation and crash the society, because, eventually socialists always run out of other people's money.
I'm skeptical. We have millions of folks receiving thousands per year in "temporary" assistance (cash, housing, medical, energy assistance, public transportation, etc.) and they never seem to emerge from their situation.
How were these test folks selected? How much supervision/hand holding did they get during the trial period?
Let everyone print their own money. See how that works out.
Want to end poverty?
Pay poor people to be sterilized.
It’s the only way.
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