Yeah I don’t think it makes cities a hellhole or its the DAs fault. Locally, I wonder if the legalization of pot has turned some people towards harder drugs and that has exacerbated the issue. No data on this but at times it has seemed worse than it used to be.
It just sucks to be “hurt” by the “bad areas” of a city. My fiance is a teacher where the majority of her kids are from 0 income households. Just not easy solutions.
I’d say basically zero. Your chain grocery store in a higher end area won’t have higher prices than one in the worse part of town. They want to have consistent prices. The other store will just be much less profitable and might even be close to a loss leader but they just want a footprint in that area because of competition.
One thing is for sure there needs to be somewhere for people who have fallen through the cracks of capitalism to go besides prison or a street corner. It’s a moral outrage obviously, and it’s also incredibly inefficient.
The whole reason we have homelessness and incarceration is so that the poors keep waking up to that alarm and punching into their minimum wage job because there’s something worse, but more and more people are falling through the cracks every year as the inequality ratchets up… and it’s becoming more of an outrageously expensive disaster by the hour.
Never go full boomer fellas
This feels a little “no way to stop this. Says only developed nation that cant figure it out”
Like many things. This problem has been basically solved by social democracies.
Fund drug treatment and mental health care, together with decriminalization of drugs and provision of shooting galleries.
The social sciences are full of data and publications proving this out.
Also like many things. Implementing the answer in the US might not be possible, but that’s because you are living in a failed state sliding into fascism, not because the policies are bad.
This is something that is probably harder to convince middle class people of than the rich. Rich would be cool with giving homeless people a place to live…as long as they are elsewhere.
However, I’ve had convos with people with something between $50K to $100K of income who can’t stand the thought of it. In their minds the homeless are getting something for free (i.e. rent) that they struggle to pay for. Why should the government give them free rent? Why don’t I get anything?
Even if you explain to them that giving them a place to live costs X while incarcerating them costs 2X, they see no problem with incarceration, but giving them a place to live is a bridge too far. It’s just not fair.
Looks like that chart came from reddit and is flagged as misleading:
I tried to link to the Reddit thread but can’t.
Different definitions for each country, and different years. Here’s the source source
Right, I was going to post the same thing. But it’s possible that the answer to a number of these things - mass shootings, fascist law enforcement, homelessness - is in part “have a different culture”, which can happen (see 1960s, The) but can’t be engineered overnight with technocratic solutions.
Like geewhysee posted above that seeing the fate of the poor and abject on the streets is necessary to “capitalism” which is a take lifted from Chapo except that I’m pretty sure they’re just saying it’s necessary in America. Japan, Korea and Singapore are all highly capitalist countries and that’s not how it works there; people are kept in line by social expectation. And I’m not endorsing the social structure of any of those places, I’m just using them as counterexamples for ascribing these ills to “capitalism”.
I think the real problem is more the hyper-individualistic view of the world. The American definition of “freedom” is precisely freedom from any obligation towards others. It’s true that capitalism tends to act to move society in this direction, but it’s also true for example that governments are inherently prone to corruption. It doesn’t mean all efforts to oppose those tendencies are hopeless, it means you have to be vigilant against them. But it’s for sure a problem if a society looks at the atomisation of individuals, dissolving social bonds, extreme inequality etc and is like “that’s good, actually, because it’s freedom”.
This, but I don’t think it’s sortable
But what if we cut taxes and gave them all guns instead? Maybe that would work better?
That must be why they’re so prevalent in the main urban center of Silicon Valley.
I also know Republicans, but why can’t we just ignore them and do the right thing?
These people aren’t republicans (I’m thinking of two specifically), they’re anti-gun, pro-choice, and hate Trump.
Sure we should ignore them on this, but we need their votes to get the power to do it.
I think it’s less Republican propaganda and more human nature. I’m pretty sure they would both be fine with a wealth tax on billionaires although that topic did not come up.
It’s natural to resent others getting stuff for free that you have to pay for. It’s hard to get people to see past that resentment to see why it may be good to do that. So even if Republican propaganda is involved, it doesn’t have a lot of heavy lifting to do in this spot.
It’s definitely both. Propaganda feeds on human nature. You can use propaganda to provoke fear, because fear is part of human nature.
That’s not quite it. In this case both parties pay no federal income tax. That’s fair. But only one of them gets free rent. That’s not fair. It’s not that they think the money is coming from them.
I’d agree that’s propaganda, because it’s basically false.
One of my FIL’s friends is equally clueless. Within the space of 30 minutes he laments all his tax dollars being wasted and then he tells us his elaborate plan to make sure his dad has zero assets on paper, so that Medicaid will cover his nursing home.
Sound like DINOs to me.
Moving the Overton Window so far left that they have empathy for poor people may be a bridge too far, I know.