The Hoax of Homeless Reform

www.RogerForMayor.com ^ | Roger Schulke

[Exton1]

THE HOAX OF HOMELESSNESS REFORM

 For those who live, work, and visit San Francisco, it has become overly apparent that the City is being overrun by dirty, smelly, and aggressive indigents who some have called “Homeless.”  These people are living on the street for a reason. It is not as if they lost their job on Friday, and end up on the streets on Monday.  To get to this place in their life they would have had to burn all their bridges, and have no family or friends to help them.

 Indigents are due to a loss in the human spirit, not to economic conditions. The only dependable route from poverty is always work, family, and faith. The first principle is that in order to move up, the poor must not only work, they must work harder than the classes above them.

If being homeless is a job problem, why are immigrants coming and supposedly taking jobs Americans do not want - and succeeding?  If the homeless had more incentive then they would be working those jobs the immigrants are taking.

Since the late 1970’s the number of indigents and those dying on the streets has been increasing. Last year almost 200 people died on the streets of San Francisco even after the City spent over $200 million on trying to help the homeless. From a study by the Leonard Davis Institute on the indigents in New York, they estimated that each homeless person used an average of $40,500 (1999 dollars) per year in publicly-support services.

The solution to the indigent problem cannot always be spending more money on programs that only expand government. In the San Francisco Chronicle May 1, 2003, page A18, is a story and picture of the fountain at the City’s U.N. Plaza. The article points out that the fountain had become a toilet, bathtub, and drug den for indigents. The solution that City officials are considering? More police arresting the perpetrators? No, the City’s solution is to spend over $1 million to redesign the plaza. 

The City has no real plans to reduce the homeless, or end welfare.  In fact the City expects to increase welfare and homelessness as a way of balancing the City’s budget. The March 21, 2003, Budget Report states that a caseload growth cost (in Human Services) will generate revenue from the State and Federal governments estimated to be $2.8 million in FY 2003, and $8.1 million in both FY 2004 and FY 2005.  However, the trap of expecting funds from the State and Federal Government is that it assumes that these funds will not be delayed or cut due to current budget problems.

If the City considers treating homelessness as a way to increase revenues, what incentive does the City have to eliminative, or even reduce the indigent numbers?

The only way to reduce and eliminate the homeless indigent problem is to actually set goals and department policy to reduce and eliminate the indigent from San Francisco streets. This means discouraging the practice of aggressively seeking to give away the money of the hardworking taxpayer, and discouraging people from becoming homeless. To do this the people of San Francisco must elect a mayor who will make this their number one goal.

 Support the only candidate whose number one goal is to reduce and eliminate the indigent from San Francisco streets, Roger Schulke for Mayor.

[GoLightly]

I heard California was considering legislation to force meds & treatment for the mentally ill, though I heard it quite awhile ago. Do you know if that legislation has gone anywhere?

[Carry_Okie]

Well structured essay. A few suggestions:

The only dependable route from poverty is always work, family, and faith.

It's true, but it won't sell. Try, 'work, family, and education.' Faith is a turn-off to the voters you want to recruit and isn't integral to what you can do as Mayor anyway. As you know, many if not most of these people have no family. As for education, teach them to pick up trash. It takes about 30 minutes.

So, give them work? No work, no food? You do know how many Federal court cases you're up against, I hope. That's what made this mess when Reagan was forced to release this crowd from mental hospitals.

So as far as I am concerned, your thesis needs more explanation and your antithesis more power.

Toward the latter, your point about the outrageous motivation system where the City is using the homeless to employ a bureaucracy is very good and the data are compelling. I think you could make more of that middle-class dependance upon these creatures as a moral outrage.

[Carry_Okie]

San Francisco boink.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

"The only way to reduce and eliminate the homeless indigent problem is to actually set goals and department policy to reduce and eliminate the indigent from San Francisco streets."

Thus eliminating the use of bureaucracy.

[Chuckster]

Read de Toqueville's essay on pauperism. To put it in very simplistic terms: eliminate overly liberal welfare programs = eliminate, or at least substantially reduce, the problem of beggars in the streets.

[randog]

If the City considers treating homelessness as a way to increase revenues, what incentive does the City have to eliminative, or even reduce the indigent numbers?

That could be said of any governmental agency, be it local, county, state, or federal. Every bureaucrat wants to grow his department, just like a businessman growing his business.