

Homeless, But Enjoying Hawaii On $3 A Day - AaronM
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126675999&sc=fb&cc=fp

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charlesju
1\. I really like Singapore's solution to welfare, it's called work-fare.
Singapore only gives the homeless help if they are willing to put in work
doing -- something, anything. It could be as simple as carrying a brick from
one side to another for an hour. The simple fact that they have to earn their
meals negates the sour taste of hand outs and yet still allows for the
homeless to have a route to take to get back on their feet.

2\. As a secondary note, while welfare is unfortunate, what is more
unfortunate is that we spend more money on murderers than those with mental
illnesses roaming our streets. It is a twisted system where doing a crime
towards society is given more monetary reward than simply not being able to
fit in.

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jat850
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, or that your point is right or wrong,
but with as strong a statement as you made in point #2, you should cite
references - even if only so that others can be aware of the situation.

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lutorm
I think the point is that it's very expensive to keep people in prison, much
more so than giving a homeless person a meal. You have to provide a very
solidly built, if not large, home for everyone and keep them company 24/7.

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edw519
Applications are now open for Hawaii-combinator:

For 5% of your start-up we fund you with a laptop and $273. It's not much, but
it's enough.

It will cover your room and board and full health care benefits for 91 days.
No more ramen (like other programs); eat delicious chopped beef steak with
vegetables, mashed potatoes, bread, a fresh apple and cake. Demo day on the
beach. Apply now!

~~~
jacquesm
Thanks for the laugh Ed, it is much appreciated.

You could do a series of those based on country stereo types.

The Dutch version:

IJ-Combinator, for 5% of your start-up we fund you with hijacked wifi on a
laptop stolen from a parked car and E 19 per day. This lets you eat and sleep
at the local Salvation Army. Free drugs on Friday, demo day in the vondelpark
under the bridge at midnight. Be sure to bring your own cardboard box.

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eru
Only German tourists do drugs in the Netherlands. (At least that's the
stereotype educated Germans have.)

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abstractbill
English people have the same stereotype (only English tourists do drugs in the
Netherlands).

~~~
jacquesm
One of them must be wrong then.

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joubert
Both could be wrong

~~~
jacquesm
_whoosh_.

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cryptnoob

         Meanwhile, Hawaiian taxpayers face a $1.2 billion budget 
         deficit, which is being addressed in part with deferred 
         state tax refunds and deferred Medicaid reimbursements.
    

Hawaii doesn't have a sales tax. It's a tourist destination without sales tax.
How silly is that? I get so tired of these "but that's a regressive tax!"
wails and nashings of teeth.

For any tourist destination, a sales tax is beautiful, because you get to tax
people who don't live there. There is a danger that given two tourist
destinations of equal attractiveness, the one without the sales tax may draw
more tourists, but this isn't a problem for Hawaii. Where are you going to go,
if you want beaches and sun and live on the west coast? Hawaii or Mexico, and
there's a lot of people who go to Hawaii that wouldn't be comfortable with
Mexico, so it's off the table. For Hawaii to tax their own people but not
tourists seems like a strategically poor move.

A homeless program that cost $2M was not nearly as interesting to me as the
fact they, of all states, had a budget deficit.

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whalesalad
I lived in Honolulu for 3 years up until about a week ago. Sales tax is 4.5%.

~~~
cryptnoob
You don't have a sales tax, in that the consumer is not taxed. Instead, you
have an excise tax, where the business is taxed. Many businesses will show how
much they inflated their prices in order to pay their excise tax, and show
this as a line item on the receipt. That's their choice. That doesn't make it
a sales tax.

Again, Hawaii is taxing it's own people, instead of it's tourists. In self-
defense, many of those businesses pass that tax on to the tourists and itemize
it on their receipts, but many don't.

~~~
barry-cotter
The effectice payee of a tax has nothing to do with who officially pays it and
everything to do with who wants it, or wants shot of it, more badly.

The impact of this excise tax is exactly the same as a sales tax.

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biggitybones
"I think that we really need to begin to look at who's really homeless - not
by choice and by misfortune - and who's really homeless by choice, and have a
different solution for the two different populations."

And thus in a nutshell describes the moral hazard of such programs. It's just
another situation of balancing a program for those in truly in need and those
trying to take advantage of the system. Very difficult to define boundaries.

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spoiledtechie
All I could think when reading the article were they were taking advantage of
the system and a lot of peoples hard earned salaries.

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jhancock
<snip> Gary Phillips purchased a $400 airline ticket to Hawaii three months
ago. He was homeless in San Diego for years, but is now earning cash from
Hawaii's 5-cent redemption program for plastic bottles and aluminum cans.

"I recycle here," he says. "I make money doing that." Some days, over $40, he
says. </snip>

So, he collects roughly 800 recyclables a day to earn an average of $40/day.
He obviously uses some of that $40 in the local economy as his social services
are only costing him $3/day. He receives: "And he sleeps at the IHS shelter
for $3 a day, with three free meals, $200 worth of food stamps and the state's
free health care program." I'm assuming the $200 in food stamps are per month.

Perhaps this system, at least for this anecdote, is optimized. Could the state
have state employees with all employee benefits doing collections of
recyclables for this amount? Could the state manage a prisoner work program to
collect recyclables for less? Is this homeless person taking money from
someone else in the local economy that otherwise would have collected the
recyclables?

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jackfoxy
I don't know the actual numbers involved. Let's assume the recyclable deposit
is $.05.

If Gary is collecting 800 improperly disposed containers (i.e. litter) per
day, the argument the state is getting a good deal is valid. But I suspect the
vast majority of the containers were fished out of trash recepticles. The
marginal cost to the state of hauling recyclables from a trash bin to the
land-fill, and the marginal cost of adding to the land-fill has got to be way
below $.05. So I suspect it is not such a good deal for the state.

~~~
fleitz
Generally in states that have a refund the purchase is charged to the consumer
so the state isn't paying anything for the service. Of course you'd have to
add in administration of the program itself, which is a relatively fixed cost
independent of whether people return bottles or not.

~~~
jackfoxy
That't right. So when the container is NOT returned, the state is in the
money. The benefit to the state is when homeless pick up litter. There is no
benefit in paying out a deposit for a container retrieved from a trash bin.

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lutorm
This seems to be a problem with not having uniform policies across the nation.
I think a similar thing is happening in the European Union with its free
movement but no uniform internal policies -- locations that have more generous
policies attract needy from the places that don't.

I'm all for universal health coverage and making sure that people who can't
find work can get support, but this is why piecemeal solutions don't work. It
needs to be national.

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feydr
that last little bit about distinguishing between being homeless by choice
versus misfortune is just bollocks -- as someone who has been in those shoes
(homeless by choice) and having met a LOT of 'homeless' people I can attest
that it is ALL by choice -- sure it might be pyschologically harder for one
person to bring themselves back up into 'society' if they have let rougher
circumstances befall them but it's still a matter of choice -- living pro-
actively instead of re-actively allows you to define your situation rather
than letting it define you

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cschneid
Except you know, when there's mental illness, physical disease, drug
addiction, or some other pretty major reason that they can't just "snap out of
it".

You are right that people who don't have that kind of barrier should, and
mostly do get back into society after a period of hard times. The chronic ones
are homeless for a reason, and it's pretty insensitive to just say that they
should live "pro-actively".

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joss82
How can a computer programmer become homeless, if not by choice?

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patio11
The classic ways are mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and (quite
commonly) all three.

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jacquesm
I had to look at the item ids to see who wrote that first!

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juhghjkjhnb
They should send these immigrants back to where they came from.

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melling
People are creating accounts just to troll? Someone needs to address this.

