U.S. Could End Homelessness With Money Used To Buy Christmas Decorations !!

Imagine a world without homelessness -- or tinsel.

It would cost about $20 billion for the government to effectively eliminate homelessness in the United States, a Housing and Urban Development official told the New York Times on Monday.

That's just slightly less money than Americans spend on Christmas decorations, according to an analysis from ThinkProgress. Nearly 634,000 people were homelesslast year, according to HUD. Check out ThinkProgress' infographic:

'Murica!

Yeah,it's hard to believe that none of the Presidential candidates has made that a priority. 20 billion isn't that much,but the homeless don't vote,do they?

There are plenty of examples of socialist/communist regimes where society is/was sick, unfair and cruel. Venezuela; North Korea; the Soviet Union; East Germany.

Capitalism may not be perfect but it paves the way for technological and cultural advances not available to any type of "controlled state , either right or left.

But can they spend a small amount of money to provide life saving shelter to the homeless? It looks like a no brainer to me.

For them to do that, they have to be sure that the 20bn taken from elsewhere will not have a detrimental affect on the economy.

For example, lets say everyone in the US refrains from buying xmas decorations for one year and we cure homelessness, yippee. Now tell the hundreds of thousands of folks who rely on that xmas trade (factory workers , shop assistants, delivery drivers etc) and who can no longer pay their rent or feed their families that you have achieved a resounding success.

Your motives are very noteworthy, and I agree more needs to be done. However , every action has a consequence, and it will take more than a quick fix.

Socialist/communist societies have continiously failed to deliver growth and the technological advances that require it.

The "select few" always seem to be the Party Leaders in socialist societies. In all the western nations the vast majorty of people have a better standard of living and better health than they have ever enjoyed.

It's a matter of priorities. What's more important.

What is important is to establish a long term solution to the problem which may take a few years to fix.

Any attempt at a short term fix by throwing money taken from other budgets could setback the economy causing significantly greater financial hardship to a significantly greater number of people.

We saw this in the last 12 years in the UK where a government sought to increase the public sector by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and financing schemes which were of dubious benefit. When the financial crisis hit we were in dire straights with public finances and the resultant measures to get back on track have resulted in a reccession deeper and more prolonged than it needed to be.

A well run economy will generate tax reciepts to deal with social issues of which there are many A poorly run economy will end up making the needy even worse off.

We waste hundreds of billions on killing people. Let's spend 20 billion on shelter.

In the UK over 31 million people are in work. This is the highest ever recorded number.

Your scenario is a theoretical one that may need addressing at some point, but is not remotely close.

Your fear is that if 2% of the population own the majority of the wealth and benefit from the robots doing all the work, and the 98% will starve because they have no jobs ? That sounds like current day North Korea !

If a situation like that ever existed in a western democracy there would be revolution and we would start from square one.

So how much more are you paying in charitable donations, and how much more are you and everyone you know prepared to pay in taxes ?

20billion is peanuts.

20 bn is the yearly income of 400,000 Americans. Not peanuts.

KF assbender

I am saying you cannot take 20 bn from one part of the economy and expect it not to have an impact. The tinsel came from the OP's title and the article he linked to.

Its not that easy though. I live in a country that americans would probably consider Socialist or even Communist, we pay high taxes and virtually everybody can get wellfare money if they dont have a job, enough to pay rent and live.

And we still have homeless. Most of them are mentally ill people though.

One reason mentally ill people still get homeless is that there are systems and such you need to go through to get the social money. You need that because you cant just make a "free for all house for anyone that wants", because otherwise non-homeless people would sell their houses and get a free one.

And the mentally people and drug addicts arent able to show up at the meetings at the correct time with the correct papers etc. Like all you need to do is print out a bank statement to proove you dont have millions on your account, but if your head is a mess just this can be difficult.

I guess you could cut down A LOT on homelessness in the US with some socialistic-inspired policies, but getting rid of it alltogether is virtually impossible.

Because you need to make control systems to prevent a abuse, and then some people just cant get through that because their lives are total messes. And ironically, this is the people the system is made for.

Depends on what you consider socialistist. You could consider Denmark socialistis, although we also have some very capitalistis parts to out society. And we have growth and jobs and everything.

But I think it works best in small countries and in real big countries like USA its much more difficult to make gigantic social programmes work roughly as intended.

Raspberry Yog

You are correct, I perhaps should have used the phrase "extreme/very left socialist/comunist". I apologise.

I think the Danish left of centre polititians have a much more pragmatic approach than the current socialist opposition leaders in my country.

Exactly its complicated.

If you took the 20 billion it from the christmas decorations as suggested, there would be people unemployed because of it right away - the shops would have lesser sales, thus less use for shop staff, transport staff etc. 20 billions of christmas decorations, it must generate a lot of jobs, and you'd loose those jobs if you eliminated the christmas stuff.

It would suck if you got homeless because your christmas decorations company went bankrupt from one day to the other.