Trump's DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City's Entire Homeless Population
Trump's DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City's Entire Homeless Population
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It’s never about the cost. It’s always about the hate.
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And fear
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Same as it ever was.
The Cruelty Is The Point.
They'd put all the money in a literal pile and set it on literal fire before they'd just help people who need the help.
If I had to characterize the US govt when it comes to helping its citizens I'd compare it to Immortan Joe.
Immortan Joe: Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
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the stupid thing is, scandinavia mostly cured their homeless problem. They put up homeless apartment buildings, then assisted them to reintegrate into society, by getting a job, finding a place to live etc. They.... saw the humanity and helped them achieve something. Oh, but the USA would never help people down on their luck. Ugh.
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Yep. Cruelty and intimidation.
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Can someone explain to me, seriously…
why is there no one with the authority to deem him unfit to govern, and demand that he step down under duress of consequences? I mean, he is clearly addled and his entire administration is provenly grifting America- Why is no one demanding that he step down?
This seriously is the end of the road for me when it comes to making enough sense of any of this that that at least resembles a modicum of logic and rationality. At this point, I just can’t understand anything beyond why this isn’t a thing, and if it is,
what are they waiting for?
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I keep seeing Americans post things like this. There's no one coming to save you.
The American people are the ones who need to be making those demands. The government should fear the people, not the other way around. Isn't this scenario exactly why there's the second amendment?
Sorry to say that this problem has been allowed to progress to the point where it will be neither convenient nor easy to solve. It's going to take consistent collective action.
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I'm sorry, but do you actually understand what a concentration camp is and how permanent death is? No disrespect, but I see so many Canadians on here confused why we aren't fighting harder. Plenty of us are. But maybe it's the privilege of not knowing true American Police brutality with chemical weapons and actual lead bullets.
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The only people with the power to decide he is unfit are all in congress, and playing a "my team vs your team" game. I'm assuming they think they'll look bad or weak or like traitors and are not willing to actually do it, or there are simply two distinct realities people live in, and in one of them he is perfectly fit to do the job.
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There needs to be a contingency. There’s no way we can go on with this. As long as you have the house and the senate, you’re above the law?
Someone needs to step in.
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why is there no one with the authority to deem him unfit to govern, and demand that he step down under duress of consequences?
There is, it's called impeachment followed by a vote to remove. That vote can't pass without Republicans joining in, and they likely won't.
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The people. Americans. That's what we're waiting on.
the issue is unlike other nations in the world American law enforcement and the military will NOT hesitate to point a tank barrel in your face and pull the trigger. They are MORE than willing to fly the air force over some random town in Ohio and turn it into a parking lot. In places like France the people can riot for being told that Paper should not be thrown in the recycling bin anymore because French Authorities aren't going to start a mass slaughter of their people, American authorities on the other hand have very little regard for their fellow man.
I was one of those Canadians wondering "why aren't the people fighting back?" but now I get it. Chances are if the American people start fighting back a good massive chunk of them will be killed. So the question now is are the American people willing to literally DIE for their country? I don't blame a single one of them if they answer "no."
Because lets be honest here why throw your life away for a country that has already turned it's back on you WELL before a Nazi wannabe dictator took office. Make no mistake Americans were STILL struggling under Democratic leadership. So I don't blame them. They're tired, they're all barely surviving, their healthcare is tied directly to their employment (by design). Systems have been building and put in place for decades to ensure they DON'T rebel. Most Americans live paycheque to paycheque. The healthcare they do pay out the ass for is already pretty shitty. So fighting for ones country means you and your family no longer eat, no longer have a place to sleep, no longer have healthcare. again, this is by design.
If you've ever wondered how other Dictatorships in the world took power, this is how, this is EXACTLY how. Leverage already established systems, crank them a bit more, take and hold power.
The cards have been MASSIVELY stacked against the American people for a good long while now. Frankly, rebelling isn't an option. Like Oliver they now have to hold their wooden bowls infront of Furor Trump and ask "Please sir, may I have another?"
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They're called voters.
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They were called voters. They don't matter anymore, you're gonna see any potential for voters to influence things get removed by extensive and massive gerrymandering.
IMO, y'all just had your last 'real' election.
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Yeahs this is why I am usually responding to things like this saying that it was all avoidable. 91 million people stayed home and didn’t bother.
That’s what caused this. I not wish there was a way out for those that did their part.
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Millions of people are demanding that Trump step down or be removed. A large portion of the country still wants him in office. Al Green proposed impeachment and the house voted it down 344 to 79. Most people in authority do not want to remove Trump. The time to stop him was last November.
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The time to stop him was last November.
I’ve been screaming that from the rooftops. I was just wondering/wishing if we had a system in place somehow that allowed for emergency situations like having a wannabe tyrant turned terrorist manchild in office.
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And then you'd get Vance. Would you actually be better off
ofor just in a slightly different, adjacent hell?-
Whataboutism at it's finest. And if Vance is unfit, we challenge it too. Simple as that.
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Yes, because Vance doesn't have the charisma to be a cult leader.
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Vance has no cult power . I'd trade for that asshelmet in a second. Watch how fast all Americans lose cohesion and interest when their fav icon detonates.
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I'm very supportive out housing the homeless as a fix, but to be clear math is on a per-day basis, it isn't some sort of long term fix.
I hate these stupid math headlines that don't actually make any sense.
Current deployment costs are around $1.1 million per day, housing all of those people in shelters at $45 per person works out to something like $250,000 per day.
This math calculation entirely ignores the fact that there aren't enough shelters to actually do that.
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Would other costs go down over time? Housed people don’t need emergency healthcare nearly as much, and with a permanent address that would open doors to a lot of things.
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I can’t believe you would forget the interests of the shareholders here
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It's a simplistic calculation, but it does seem that often doing the right thing ends up cheaper in the long run. It just doesn't benefit certain groups, so it's not an option. If a million a day was applied to not just pay for sheltering, but to find solutions there wouldn't be a problem to throw authoritative measures at, or use as a reason to tighten security and control. They don't want to fix the problem, it works for them.
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They will happily spend $10, $20, $40, $100 from the working class to put even an extra penny in the hands of the capitalist class
Michael Parenti talking about American empire and it's cost to the workers in the imperial core.
Which is fitting because I believe he also said (or he quoted someone that did)
Fascism is Imperialism turned inwards.
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When communist were forced on Poland by soviets in 1945 one of their tasks for the next decade (that continued until 1980 collapse) was to build houses and give it to people. Other tasks were less nice like killing opposition, but housing was indeed how they decided to spent the resources.
US could start a massive communal housing programm on federal budget. They chose not to.
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We don't even need to build housing. That's the worst part.
We just need to outlaw landlords.
"But no one will purchase our valueable real estate and we lose money by keeping it!"
And what happens when you have a supply of housing that far exceeds demand? Well if it's an actual functioning economy the cost of housing decreases. The ifs are doing a lot of fucking lifting in this idea though.
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Ok what about we increase the budget 4x? We can put each homeless person in hotel for $180 a day. The hotel shareholders would be happy too.
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Cruelty is the point. I really don't think this country will ever change in any positive direction, sadly.
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The point is to 'test run" military protection around the White House.
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This. They know that none of this is sustainable on a the grand scale.
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It worse than the country won't change - it's humanity that won't change.
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Nominative determinism strikes again.
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How so?
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Trump's deployment of the National Guard to Washington, DC costs more than 4 times as much as it would cost to simply house every homeless person in the city according to researcher Hanna Homestead.
It's a very fitting name for the researcher.
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Even without the occupation, housing-first costs less.
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Look up how much we send to Israel to conduct a genocide
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countless after countless studies showed UBI will eliminate homelessness and wasteful bureaucracy to keep watch of welfare recipients and cheats
Everyone: Nah, we don't do that here.
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Rich people in control of the city, it's businesses and services: nah, we don't do that here.
- ftfy
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How else are you going to keep everyone else in line if the fear of being homeless isn't hanging over their heads?
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People say these facts, but not the base fact that all these facts prove which is that this lifestyle and the narrative created is completely bullshit and we are being farmed. That's our reality but it's so fucked up nobody wants to believe it. Psychological warfare owns the path of society.
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Sure but helping the homeless would make them actual Christians following the teachings of Christ and we know that now what Republican Christians do.
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Trump only ever claimed to be Christian to sell bibles.
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With his name plastered all over it, probably. Because T stands for tacky, not trump.
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TRUMP BIBLE, TRUMP BIBLE! GET YOUR TRUMP BIBLE. ORDER NOW AND WELL THROW IN A TRUMP 2028 HAT!
I wonder if he’s gonna update the included constitution in the bible with the newly redacted rights
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What a waste.
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What would happen if we just fixed stuff. Like, the wealthy can still have it all, but then stuff wouldn’t be broken. Just like, fix things. When is someone going to step up and just pay to fix stuff?
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For the wealthy to feel like they've won at life...people have to lose. If everyone was okay, then the wealthy couldn't feel superior to us.
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Never, because once you get to the levels of obscenely wealthy that the modern elite inhabit, the actual amount stops mattering, but the drive to maintain and increase it gets far stronger. Thus, they spend insane amounts on political lobbying to ensure that the government doesn't collect any money from them in taxes. As for paying for things like infrastructure, they'll never do that because spending money on that doesn't IMMEDIATELY net them returns, even if it would in the long run (better schools directly correlate to smarter, more productive workers; better Healthcare means people spend less time sick and are back on the job sooner; improved transportation means workers are early or on time, so production isn't held back as much).
Furthermore, the Elite (as it were) literally don't see the rest of us as people worthy of compassion or respect, let alone any money. Pretty sure that some studies have been done showing that, over a certain level of wealth, your brain and personality shift noticeably towards sociopathy. It's not exactly a particularly high number either, from what I recall; only a few millions of dollars.
Billionaires and other rich people will never fix society's problems unless we literally force them to at threat of life and limb, and there's little point in believing otherwise.
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This. Why would trump who is so old and in poor health want the us to not research cancer treatments like mrna. It works directly against his own interest. Instead he works to make himsef richer when at his age if he devoted himself full time to spending his wealth he would not be able to. The draw of the points just are to much. He is living the real life version of a crappy phone game.
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And herein lies the problem with capitalism. It creates the greed that undermines the very system that allows it to exist. This cannot be escaped because it’s systemic.
To a rational person, there is such a concept as “enough”, but not to the capitalist.
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The man is world famous as a money mismanager
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Are we great again yet?
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never were.
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What is actually happening to homeless people in DC at the moment?
The article is a bit vague. Some arrests, tickets?
I imagine far worse when the national guard is being called to specifically address this issue. Overall I am hearing little about the fate of the ones being targeted by the grey shirts. Does anyone have more info for an interested party?
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I just hope that in this age of great information we’ll be able to find out before the collapse of the regime.
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I think the top 2 comments i see ascribing this to ‘hate’ and ‘cruelty’ are missing the point. This literally is better for the capitalists’ bottom line. This can be entirely attributed to profit. The threat of violence (homelessness, etc) that the working class is kept precipitously close to powers this whole machine. If everybody was housed the threat of poverty would have less material consequence. Cruelty is not the point, in this case. Neither hate. Simply profit. Which in many ways is much more cold and insidious
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I get what you're saying, and I agree.
however I've also justified this by defining hate and cruelty as the method through which they achieve profit.
so to me, the message is the same
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president "epstein" trying very hard to shift public focus away from himself, and the fact that ghislaine being on work release isnt gaining more attention is something.
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"Showy? Useless? Expensive? Hurts poor people? Sounds pretty good but are you sure there is no way to put a yuge golden TRUMP sign on it?"
Trump (probably)
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Eric Adams Syndrome: Spend $1,500 to save $1
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Trump is a moron.
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He was never that good at numbers, that Donald guy.
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The cruelty is the point
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Entirely unsurprising. But invading a blue city is the kind of thing that gives those with the authoritarian mental illness rock-hard erections.
Helping people? Fuck that noise. We want to brandish our penis compensation devices and bust some heads! Time to own the libz!
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Oh don't worry, he's not going to pay them.
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They don't want to help people. They want to surpress people. To those people it hurts to help but they feel pleasure from harm. Those types are everywhere in our society but they have found a common home in maga.
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Yeah but with that 4x budget they get to look like what they think is cool, they get to be openly racist fucks and they get to enact their cruel fantasies!
Money all worth!
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Kind of like the new ICE budget. I remember seeing a tweet from some right wing lunatic saying they didn’t care if it costs a trillion dollars, deport every single undocumented immigrant. They’ve always had an endless budget for things like war and terror.
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I don't want to be the contrarian but:
Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it cost about $530 per Guard member, per day to be deployed.
How?! How could sending people that are already on the payroll to a different city cost this much? And you are really going to push such a claim, with the source being "some guys said so" and pretend to be a news organization we should take seriously?
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Because they are taking the entire cost of the operation, and dividing it by the number of folks deployed.
So that includes logistics, housing, food, equipment maintenance. Including those big expensive fucking trucks, etc etc. And of course, the MIC gets a big cut too.
Payroll is probably a small portion of that $530.
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First, I'm going to heavily qualify this statement. Like, a lot. I have never served in any military capacity and I'm repeating something a member of the Canadian military told me, which could easily be wrong for 20 reasons.
National Guardsman are similar to our "reservists" and are not paid when inactive. If additional troops who were already trained but not active, we're then activated, that would account for additional costs.
So yeah, massive grain of salt but you asked and someone gave me a reasonable answer that seemed to fit. I have done no fact checking, though.
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Thanks for the explanation. My understanding was that in the US, the national guard also had regular troops, not just reservists, but maybe they did call the reservists despite that or I misunderstood/misremembered.
Regardless, I still think an article explicitly about the cost of the deployment giving no information on this is absurd.
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Your average national guardsman isn't getting paid $530/day. That's almost $200k/year.
Most of that cost is related specifically to this mission, just divided between all the personnel deployed for this statistic.
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I agree with the general point of this post. But FYI any city that has put serious money into housing the homeless has found the homeless didn't get housed. No amount of money ends famine in Africa and no amount of money eliminates homelessness.
So yes, having national guards stand on street corners all day is a very stupid waste of money. But you can't compare it to a fictional amount of money someone just made up on the spot. Because anytime someone has made up a similar figure, and then gotten it, that number didn't do the thing they said it would. So I don't think anyone has shown they know how to estimate that number.
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What a cynical take. European cities with proper social safety nets have addressed the problem very well, and while homelessness is at non-zero levels, it’s insignificant compared to what we see in the US. “We’ll never solve it completely” doesn’t justify not trying.
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Sure, if you half ass it but if you're serious it's a a soluble issue. For example
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/02/how-finland-solved-homelessness/
The Finns have turned the traditional approach to homelessness on its head.
There can be a number of reasons as to why someone ends up homeless, including sudden job loss or family breakdown, severe substance abuse or mental health problems. But most homelessness policies work on the premise that the homeless person has to sort those problems out first before they can get permanent accommodation.
Finland does the opposite - it gives them a home first.
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No amount of money ends famine in Africa? I can definitely give you a number that would.
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If the causes of famine include corruption and repression, then more food or more money will just be taken by that corruption.
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A better take is it’s more complex than just providing shelter
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This makes sense if cruelty is the point.
Cruelty, yes, but let's not forget grift.
And cognitive dissonance. Gotta redraw those lines in the sand!
Not just cruelty. Someone else in another thread pointed out this is exactly what you would do if you're afraid of a civil war. Now, you've got an easily defended government center, and a large amount of people out in the streets that any opposing force will have to fight through in order to get to any of the governmental buildings (though really, we're only caring about the WH). Additionally, you have an oceanfront escape route if shit goes poorly.
A modern civil war won’t be like the 1860s with battle lines.
We’re looking more at a “He has to get it right every time, we only have to get it right once” situation. Lone wolves or single person attacks with outside benefactors are likely to be more common than formations of troops.