Well, now im depressed....

[Idoru]

BBC News Article

I'll say no  more than how can a 'developed' country treat people in this way.

[Proglin]

Aye... no kid should live on the streets. and that's that.

[Xordan]

Unfortunately we don't have £X billion just laying around to throw at homeless people, although a lot is given by people to charities to try and solve this. I'm not sure what can be done other than removing those children from their families and putting them in 'orphanages for homeless children', because even if the money was available I doubt the public would like all of these families being given 'free lunches'. In the case mentioned in the article, I think nobody would object to them being given a council house, their situation was bad luck. The NHS, although lacking a bit, should usually take care of medical stuff but for post natal depression it probably isn't good enough (not that I have experience ). But for the families who situations weren't caused by that (so normal debt, probably due to overspending and possibly having too many kids...) then see the second sentence of this post. Compared to some other countries (see the 700,000 homeless in the US), it isn't so bad here.

[Idoru]

Compared to some other countries (see the 700,000 homeless in the US), it isn't so bad here.

No, it isnt, that would make me think the problem should be much easier to solve.

£X billion just laying around to throw at homeless people

Unfortunatly we do appear to have it to throw at arms manufacturors, NHS Management Consultants, MPs personal allowances, Christmas Decorations in the streets........

I think nobody would object to them being given a council house

Apart from the local council it would seem.

[Xordan]

From a economical side of things:

Do you think those things would go away if budgets were cut to free up the money? All that would happen is for services to degrade. Unfortunatly, we live in a bureaucratic society, and worse for this, a democracy.

Things take a long time to be done, and money disappears pretty easily. For this reason, if the government said it would enforce getting rid of christmas lights, cutting personal allowances etc. little extra money would appear out of it. Our government hasn't much control of where funds go once they're spread around, so it's not just a matter of saying "get rid of this this and this". Plus there's no guarantee that the money put into a 'homes for homeless' scheme would actually get to it. We can't even control funding for big projects like Wembley It's the same in every country that has this kind of system. I think the only country which is moving in the direction where everyone will be well fed, clothed, housed etc. is China.

Local councils have a bad record for being nice And as our governments (and people) keep supporting devolution, that's not going to get any better (less control on money). If you do rough adding up, let's say it costs £100k investment for each council house to be built, 100,000 homeless families, that's £10 billion up front to solve the problem, which is assuming that we never have any homeless families afterwards. Realistically, that amount isn't going to be produced overnight without serious degradation of services, to which people will object.

So basically, this isn't solved and won't be (for a long time anyway) purely down to our whole society and system. This applied to every country like ours. Not enough people know, want to know, or care. Does this mean we're not 'developed'? No, if you compare us to 'developing' countries

As for a more personal view rather than a economical view, I'd say that the real problem lies in making sure that people don't become homeless due to something like illness. That was the point of the NHS. The family in that article should have been given extra help for that situation. For people who go homeless because of debt... well that's their fault. They can declare bankruptcy, and if they can't support their children (house, feed etc.) then their children should be taken to a place where they will be. The most important point I think I can make, is that people seem to love giving money to charities to help people abroad. Where is that money for our own people? If all the money given by our people to charity went on our own problems... then I don't think there would be a problem because we have all the funding we need. As well as this, maybe if people looked after their finances better we wouldn't have such a big problem as well. We should look a bit less to our government and more to ourselves to solve this.


  That was long.

[zanzibar]

Unfortunately we don't have £X billion just laying around to throw at homeless people

Actually, we do.  A lot of military spending is actually just a cover for corporate giveaways.  The richest members of society have ways of escaping all income tax.  Not just some, but all.

If that money was taken back by the people, then homelessness and hunger food insecurity could be eliminated.

[Xordan]

I was talking more about the UK than the US, but the same thing applies. If you cut the military budget, do you really think those giveaways would stop? I admit that Americans have more power to do something about it that we do over here.

[Datruth]

Unfortunately we don't have £X billion just laying around to throw at homeless people

Actually, we do.  A lot of military spending is actually just a cover for corporate giveaways.  The richest members of society have ways of escaping all income tax.  Not just some, but all.

If that money was taken back by the people, then homelessness and hunger food insecurity could be eliminated.

Ya zanz, we do the same thing here in America, It's known as PORK Barroling.(hope i spelled that right  )

And yes we can fix this problem.

Making sure our tax money goes to the right sources, will eliminate this, just look at Sweden for example, i bet there are less than 1,000 homeless people.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And yea idoru.... that was a touching story  Thanks for sharing bro

* Datruth puts my head down again, off on the search for answers

~~Datruth

[zanzibar]

I was talking more about the UK than the US, but the same thing applies. If you cut the military budget, do you really think those giveaways would stop? I admit that Americans have more power to do something about it that we do over here.

I don't think I understand you.  I'm not saying that we should cut the military budget; I'm saying that we should stop corporate giveaways, and corporate giveaways are included in the military's budget.  In America, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  The UK's population is much less as is their military spending, but the same idea applies.

@Datruth:  It's not just a matter of pork spending.  It's stuff like the military contracts that went to Haliburton, stuff like mailboxes in Bermuda, tax cuts for the top percent of the economic ladder, all of that crap.  American military spending in general is just incredibly stupid.  It's not well known, but the US airforce works to have more planes than they have pilots, and they'll spend many tens of millions of dollars on each aircraft and then they'll sell them at a fraction of that because they "need" to be replaced by something newer and better!  It's an industry designed to siphon money out of the middle class and into the elite.

I really do think that we live in a time of aristocracy and Orwell's "1984" is more right than wrong.  I thought that we wouldn't see a populist uprising because our middle class has been afforded a certain level of luxury and privledge - not to mention how we're fed an ideology where we blame the poor and the disenfranchised for the evils of society - but now I look at the effects of the muslim world on Europe, and I can't help but to question if our exploitation of third world nations is finally catching up with us.

Such exploitation wouldn't be possible with the direct and willing participation of the middle class, but most people are so ignorant that you can't really blame them.  We'll all be dead within 50 years from global warming though.  My guess is that significant changes will happen closer to 20 years from now though - most oil may be gone by then, but people will switch to coal which is even dirtier.  Add in the fact that the rain forests will be almost completely gone ten years from now, and with ocean temperatures rising we might have a sudden and massive die-off of algae... we're not heading anywhere good.  I think that poverty does play a role.  Poverty keeps people ignorant and desperate.



blech

[Idoru]

OK, ive opened my little book of facts lol,

Trident: Estimated cost 20Bn Pounds, as things tend to go in the UK you could probably double that and add a little.

UKs special reserve for the Iraq war: Currently running at 6.4bn pounds (total UK military budget per annum: 29.9bn pounds projected for 2007-2008)
(on a sidenote, total spent on the Iraq war so far by all nations equates to 1.25trillion pounds)

UK MPs wages and personal allowances: 140Million pounds (not nearly as much as I expected)

NHS Management Cost: hmmm, having problems finding that but apparently it is currently 4p in every pound spent in the NHS (btw, im not claiming we need no managers)
(Failed IT project alone cost 18Bn Pounds)

when I refered to Christmas decorations I should have made myself more clear, I was refering to those bought and put up by local councils for our own 'enjoyment'. I looked for figures for these but I couldnt find any.

If those things were reduced drasticly im sure it would make a large impact on homelessness in the UK.


The one way that we can guarantee this problem will never be fixed is by giving up and saying these problems will never be fixed.

[zanzibar]

And don't forget this money saving tool:  Less war!

[Idoru]

Very true, if we were to iradicate all war then their would be more than enough money to go around, although the economy of the US would collapse. Even though it looks like Bush's idea to start the war in Iraq to reinvigorate the US economy (or in terms he would understand, 'make it betterer') seems to have failed.

[zanzibar]

Very true, if we were to iradicate all war then their would be more than enough money to go around, although the economy of the US would collapse. Even though it looks like Bush's idea to start the war in Iraq to reinvigorate the US economy (or in terms he would understand, 'make it betterer') seems to have failed.

I don't even mean that we have to eradicate all wars.  As far as Bush starting the war in Iraq to better the US economy, look at who has really profited from the war to figure that one out.

[Xordan]

I don't think I understand you.  I'm not saying that we should cut the military budget; I'm saying that we should stop corporate giveaways, and corporate giveaways are included in the military's budget.  In America, it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  The UK's population is much less as is their military spending, but the same idea applies.

And how do we do that? Easier said than done, especially when the majority of the population don't seem to care.

As I said in my earlier post, is all very nice to say "Well we can cut this, and get rid of that or not have this", but there's nothing to say that such money would end up anywhere like in a homeless fund. Even if we got rid of Trident (not a great idea right now, but an example), or voted to not have a replacement (arguable) that money would just go into some other military project, or be spread around into different areas, or even be spent getting rid of the thing which we're supposed to be getting the money from. There's no such thing as free money transfer from one thing to another. I don't see why that point is so hard to understand. The fact that so many major government projects either go over budget or fail shows that we really can't rely on them when it comes down to something like this.

Another question is, assuming we have this large pot of money, forget where it's come from, how much help do you give to people? We can give them a house say, but what if they can't afford to pay the bills? So they go broke and it gets acquired by X loan company. Do we fork out for them again? Do we keep handing out free money over and over? What would you say a limit would be?

[zanzibar]

I know it's a pipe dream that will never happen, and that's what makes this whole situation so evil.  The solution is so simple, and yet it's impossible.