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 ...
*facepalm*
“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?”
I think you hit on the key with “temporary.” The people in this experiment were given a one-time stipend of 3,000 pounds, presumably with no promise of money into perpetuity. It’s the perpetuity that screws the system up. Give the poor a lump sum, say that’s all you’re getting, and make it all they get, and then you get different results than when you continuously extend the benefits.
I’m all for this. Take every Indian, welfare recipient, food stamp recipient, etc...and give them each $10,000. And that’s it. No more money or government food or anything, ever. Then, we layoff every government employee associated with these programs. I’d go for that.
It works for Bitcoin!
Free money hasn’t fixed poverty yet, though poverty in our country seems to involve obesity, quality phone service, utilities, housing, medical treatment...and free money.
I believe when the poor in this country became fat, we no longer had people starving to death.
Milton Friedman advocated a graduated, negative income tax. At the very least, it would represent an improvement over the status quo.
“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.”
Of course, then they had new rich people; the party leaders.
lol
If free money was given out, 2000% inflation in a year could really happen.
“Giving them money” is misleading. It’s taking my money from me by force, using it for your stormtroopers, tanks guns and bureaucrats, then giving them whattever’s left.
And then telling me they’re raising taxes and fees to hire more bureacrats and stormtroopers to point more guns at my head next year.
“Of course, then they had new rich people; the party leaders.”
And the party leaders disarmed the populace so they could stay rich at the expense of the populace.
If this becomes public policy, millions more people will become public charges.
However, equating giving street people cash with giving poor people in Namibia and Malawi "free" money - these are actually "micro-loans", not largesse - is more than a little deceptive. The two economic situations are entirely dissimilar.
The Calvinistic reflex that you have to work for your money has turned into a license for inequality.
It's quite a bit older than Calvin, actually, it's as old as humanity. And the sort of "inequality" the author cites here is not inherently bad. The people in Namibia and Malawi, for example, were paragons of equality - they were all dirt poor.
It's an old argument repackaged, and the package never seems to leave out what the real load is. According to this Cato Institute study, spending in 2012 amounted to an average of $20,000 per recipient, $60,000 for a family of three. In most places in the country a family of three could live very comfortably on that sum including mortgage and savings. But they don't. And the reason they don't is that they don't get that money.
Color me a bit cynical over the author's claim that a simple gift of money never resulted in its being wasted. I'm sorry, I simply don't believe it. We'll see in time if the effect was permanent. It's an interesting experiment, and I'd love to see it succeed, but it hasn't. An optimist will state that it hasn't yet, a pessimist that it never will.
I think the point is that it’s a lump sum, and the recipients knew when it was gone, that was it. So they had more of an incentive to use it wisely than they would an amount that would come in every month indefinitely.
That being said, I’m still skeptical. How many of us know a family member that has gotten lump sums from other family members and still can’t get it together? Remember that case in the news of the man who won a lottery but still didnt want to give up his food benefits? I realize that when people win lotteries, or get big legal settlements, as Rodney King did, were talking about more money. Maybe the secret is that it not be a huge amount of money, just a few grand. Back in the seventies, members of Indian tribes got lump sums. They also got houses(not very good houses, I guess) and continued to get their other Indian benefits, so may not be a good comparison. I don’t know about other localities, but on the reservation we lived near, they mostly bought vehicles, so the car dealerships had extraordinary years those years, and most of the Indian families were back to business as usual after a few months. They also spent the money on lesser purchases like clothes. It’s no secret there that any Indian who wants to be “successful” in the middle class white sense of the word needs to leave the res, because there’s no jobs around the res, for one thing. (White young people generally leave those places too, unless they’re involved with a family business or something) Those non-res Indians, a lot if them, probably did use their lump sums for savings, investment, putting into businesses, house improvement, etc. I won’t speculate about drugs and alcohol, because I don’t want to contribute to the drunk Indian stereotype but everybody knows that the combination of lump sums of money and addicts often have tragic results, regardless of the race of the recipients. There is also the problem if parasitic friends and relatives who will crawl out if the word work when they smell money.
The liquor, tattoo, porn and (in some states) pot industries would see an immediate boost.
A great idea! Oh, wait...
“Street VETERANS”. LOL! I like “rough sleepers” better.
Just putting all those unionized civil "servants" out on the street to look for productive work would be a joy.
There are more glaring weaknesses in the effort than just the randomness of the selection of the vagrants.
Thirteen is hardly a very large population, especially given the ambiguous result that 11 were "off the street". Some of the original 13 were in "hostels" and some in "shelters". That's hardly a description of lifting someone out of poverty.
For all we know, the results would have been identical even without the cash distributions. That brings up a second glaring weakness in the so-called "study". Where was the "control group" which was monitored to demonstrate that the lack of money would have resulted in continued homelessness? There is no data at all to demonstrate that the efforts of those making the study had any effect whatever. For all we know, the group might have been better off without the money.
What passes for "science" these days provides a full explanation for why we are suffering the global-warming hoax.
“Free money might be the best way to end povertyFree money might be the best way to end poverty”
That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking, too: give a trillion dollar coin to each and every person in the U.S! The coins cold be minted from a base metal so it would cost only a fraction of a cent to make each one. Everybody in the U.S. would become instant trillionaires and could buy anything they could ever possibly want, and best of all, no one would ever have to work again. And while the government is at it, it could mint a few extra trillion dollar coins to fund the government and eliminate all taxes at the same time! It’s really one of those win-win situations.
Means and ends and all that. They surely could have got a wealthy businessman to fund it. But then it is wrong if it is not all “government” funded, regardless of the result.
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