I had a long statement on this in another thread. You have to balance the costs essentially. There will always be a “cost” so to speak. Tucker is just stirring his ignorant base and trolling, which is his MO, but let’s just hypothetically say you flat out cut off all benefits and resources. You’re going to have a lot more homeless people out there and a lot more people fall into homelessness. You’re going to have rising crime rates, damage and other “costs” that come with that. If the solution there is to throw them in jail, you’re actually increasing the costs because that requires a whole lot more infrastructure and expenses than people think. I suppose people like Mr. Carlson might just propose shooting them instead, but hopefully we as a society haven’t gotten to his level of detachment and demagoguery.
On the other extreme, you do take into account the human element, but it’s very possible and often so happens that blindly pumping cash into homeless and impoverished benefits leads to a poorer situation. It’s a cost to the legit tax payers and often times gets abused and mismanaged. It’s very legitimate for people to be concerned that they work hard for their money and don’t want to hand out free-be’s.
So to me, it’s balancing the cost and the human element. My wife actually has been part of a pretty innovative homeless outreach effort with a nonprofit she works for down here in Cincy. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s improving. They work closely with police so that they can deal with crises in areas where people are being housed. The overwhelming amount of homelessness involves mental health issues that often ties into narcotics usage and other problems. They are trained to be on the frontline, and it goes really well because the police don’t have to use as many of their resources and they know that when they get called in that “poop” must have gone south already. They don’t have to try to put on another hat where they haven’t been trained well.
Overall it’s a pretty decent construct. Trying to use effective resources to confront things like severe schitzophrenia, which is far more common than many think. Once that is dealt with, they try to line the people up with job resources and act as a liaison with multiple employers, so that people get back to the point where they are recontributing to society. Another thing they have set up is a payee program where the agency ends up receiving all of the government benefits on behalf of the client. They then pay for the essentials (rent, utilities, food, medication, debts, etc) before the person actually receives any leftover funds.
Like I said, it’s still evolving and improving but it’s goal is to achieve what I consider to be finding the sweet spot in cost management looking at things from the two lenses I described.
Tucker is just rabble rousing and has to keep up with his “let them eat cake” mantra, which is to be expected. Rarely does he ever say anything that has any substance to it, that actually goes beyond instilling fear, anger or obtuse doubt.
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