There’s no doubt that these people love fascism! After all the years of their whining about Dem overreach, it’s pretty hilarious.
The backlash seems entirely predictable as does the dem backlash to the backlash when they return to power .
>People don’t understand how big of a deal it is, specifically for Union Station, because there is a bridge—whether it’s the bypass, it’s either 95, 395, or 495—where the homeless, as well as people who are abusing drugs, as well as the drug dealers, they just squat.And it’s clean. It’s all gone.This was also an underpass bridge where people would throw their waste. So you would drive on the main road, and to the left and right of you, it was nothing but trash. It’s all clean.People don’t understand how big of a deal this is because the Capitol is right there, within like a six- or seven-minute walk. And then also, local residents did not like walking there, whether in the daytime or the evening. Some people would take taxis just to avoid any type of encounters.And people have been talking about cleaning this up for a decade. And you mean to tell me President Trump hasn’t even had control for 30 days, and he cleaned it all up?
Trump so fascist!
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So is the goal now to enact the war on crime and increasingly spend more money indefinitely maintaining police & NatGuard presence in every single major city in the US until the crime “disappears”?
Let’s assume the homeless and all flee DC… They’re homeless, they’re not going back home. Just end up elsewhere.
Or maybe… Some more of that good ol fashioned for-profit highly-effective mass incarceration we all love so much?
Is that what happened in LA?
I posted a while ago about the resurgence of insane asylums. I’m all for getting mentally ill and dangerous people and addicts off the streets.
Relaxation of drug laws is bleeding the prison-for-profit industry dry because their current money-maker prisoners (mostly in there for drug issues) are gradually completing their sentences. Not enough people to replace them. Oh what is a sociopath who makes their money off of imprisonment to do?! 
They sorely need more meat for the grinder and it seems like ICE will help provide it. Pretty evil.
After all, with outcomes as good as those of the US prison system, who could ever oppose that!
So you think what then? Keep the mentally unpalatable folks on the streets? That’s better somehow?
Let’s take a step back to reality, US can not afford to take all mentally ill and drug addicted off the streets, the cost would be tremendous so not possible
Let me ask you the same! What, just arrest them and leave them in jail/rehab or whatever indefinitely until they are deemed “no longer mentally unpalatable”?
All research on our prison policies suggests this will have 0 net effect on crazies on the street. Criminalization of addition has had no positive effect on addiction rates. The only “net positive” this kind of imprisonment provides in the US is basically just keeping them away from crime for a few years. Oh, and slave labor… If you want to list that as a positive🤣
Sure, some go to jail and decide that it’s not really for them, get out, and make something of themselves. All stats say this is an overwhelming minority.
But if your suggestion is just randomly taking street people in, drug and mental testing on the dubious foundation that they might be addicts/cray cray, and then jailing them for some time, does that really do any good beyond some temporary time-out for those individuals? And what happens when they’re out? Do we just maintain and fund perpetual street police (supported by the national guard, mind you!) who are around just to take in these people? And this when we already have prisons bursting and insufficient mental health and addition support resources? And when the recidivism rate is so incredibly awful?
If you want to really know what I think would make a lot of these problems significantly better, here goes:
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socialized healthcare. Without a doubt. Free or near free health resources will help all Americans, significantly reduce the # of folks who fall into poverty and immense debt after incidents, will help those who are mentally ill seek help for this (as they often are already economically in a precarious situation), etc. Should be a no-brainer to anyone with a brain. We have the money for this in the US and frankly it disgusts me that we don’t have it. Life is a important precursor to liberty, and while money doesn’t give happiness, it sure helps to reduce unhappiness.
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there’s a ton more that could be done for the homeless in terms of sheltering and providing for them, and it is largely done through charities, not the government, and is thus largely insufficient. I’ve volunteered at a homeless shelter in a relatively affluent area and even it had to turn folks down due to not having sufficient vacancy. And this doesn’t address the issues of finding a job when you don’t have an address you can provide, a telephone number for callbacks, a shower and a washer to keep yourself sufficiently (and just as importantly, at societally-nescessary levels of) clean. There are ways to do it, but it is not simple, and the options get harder to access the further one slips into poverty. Add addiction to this and, oof. Good luck, because you’ll not be getting help from American society!
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more accessible housing in good districts. There’s little good in building projects in the middle of a commercial desert. If you need a car to get 30 minutes to a job, that’s a huge deal. Tonnes of cash lost, buying, maintaining, and caring for cars, and that’s before the expenses of an accident. And that’s before considering one might live in an area with little access to any jobs in the first place. It also provides children in such households with significantly better education, as we somehow operate on the miserably flawed belief that our education systems are equal. Separate but equal but along economic lines now instead of race. More and cheaper (perhaps even free below X income?) public transit would also significantly benefit many of these communities, but good luck with that. I might even believe that good PT is less likely to be politically feasible in the US than social healthcare. Fucking Nimbys. And I’m not talking some awful private “public transit” system, which will inevitably get rid of the positive externalities (access, primarily) of transit in favor of profit, and probably be unreliable to boot.
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education tends to be a great determining factor in who will end up a criminal. And this ties into previous point, our education system is greatly unequal from location to location. This obviously poses great difficulties, but money spent on education does pay for itself later in economic productivity. That is to say, there is such thing as a free lunch. This obviously will be harder to offer to those already old enough to be experiencing the issues at hand, but throwing them into jail or rehab and expecting them to come out as functional members of society when their economic conditions have not changed at all – in fact, only worsened! – is ridiculous. Prioritizing further education (occupational is always in need, and perhaps even additional chances for university participation would be huge for those who want it) and encouraging it through jail and rehab would be an obvious method. But making further education cheaper or free benefits ALL of us, and is also an obvious route for decreasing the factors that lead to this in the first place… Most addicts aren’t doing well financially when the get addicted, and especially not those who are getting on fentanyl and the like.
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There are interesting studies on the topic of free meals at school. Poverty is partially hard to escape as it, especially when experienced during childhood, tends to “rewire” the brain to take what it can get when it can get it. I can provide details as needed on this later; I don’t have the source available and can’t remember the details of the study. Suffice to say, a free lunch, increased child support, and increased access to education (including occupational!) would be of great benefit generally to outcomes here. Not having to worry about transit, improved education, and free healthcare on top of that is a recipe for a considerably greater chance of success.
I’m sure there are places that have handled addiction significantly better than we are handling it now. Portugal comes to mind, I do believe their harm reduction and rehab programs have had some very good results, but don’t quote me on that. It’s been a minute. Either way either how, countries that take care of their citizens meaningfully tend to have less instances of severe mental health issues and drug abuse, and I’d be willing to bet money that they also have better outcomes on jail and addiction. Because I know they do.
Fundamentally, driving folks out and imprisonment in the American context doesn’t help these problems at all, it just pushes them down the road. If a band-aid is sufficient as a solution to you, ok. No room for arguing there, it’ll very temporarily alleviate the problems we are facing. But if you, like me, want tax money to go towards improving the nation on a longer term basis, this is obviously a waste of money that could be so meaningfully spent elsewhere to great effect.
It’s the perpetual war, you expel the homeless and crazy or imprison them. They go elsewhere, you kick them out there, they go elsewhere, you imprison them now, they get out later, you imprison them again, they get out later. And almost certainly no better off than they previously were.
No, it totally could. The US could afford to take them in. In fact, many horrible companies will probably profit off of the act of doing so. We could also afford to help them recover, and teach trades/something to help them meaningfully re-enter society.
The operative word is could, as we don’t. And we won’t as long as we keep electing folks who reduce taxation on the rich, slash some thousands of bureaucratic jobs to make the world’s tiniest splash in the proverbial pond of government expenditures, and follow the already-shown to be dysfunctional basic-bitch austerity path (cut all the social programs) mixed with not even getting close to balancing the budget and even increasing it. We spend huge amounts of taxes to keep business afloat who hoarde wealth at the top of their org, while being pathologically resistant to anything that would, at indivual expense via taxes, help out all of our fellow Americans. Because it’s communist to have healthcare for all, and we aren’t communist for people. But we’re totally happy to throw money at major businesses when they’re struggling.
What we have here is a severe lack of class consciousness predicated historically at least partially on racism and discrimination, and partially on businesses being free to do largely whatever they want, and doing as such. We gave up our labor movement not entirely willingly, and often with force, and now we’re stuck with the end result of nearly everything always getting worse, and with no meaningfully different courses of action to address these issues as anything with the S-word is immediately third railed by both parties (just look at how the Dems fucked Bernie!). And the pathological worship – societally, but also institutionally and educationally altough increasingly less there – of old economic research like that of Sowell and Friedman (despite their countless flaws including heavy reliance upon what are essentially assumptions, and noticable lack of including stats) means that most Americans will never learn that there is, sometimes, indeed such thing as a free lunch, and won’t accept the concept that something running at a loss can still provide considerable economic net positives before even considering societal benefits.
Tl;dr america could totally be great but if doing the same shit we’ve been doing since the 80s hasn’t done it, it ain’t gonna do it this time either. It depresses me to see such great wealths of all kinds squandered on the corporate dominated hellscape it is. And it crushes me that American politics has lost any sense of openness for actually innovative policies proven in the rest of the world as effective, their foreignness instead relegating them to being seen as unachievable in the states (public transit) or worse, anti-American (socialized anything, anything nice the Europeans do, rank choice voting, etc.etc.)
I do, yet I would argue that money has been spent and spent and spent and the result has been meh.
I’m not sure where you come from, but I lived in a rural place then a small city, 100k, with big city problems. The “leave them on the street with their dignity” route doesn’t work, nor does the “let the community” work with them via nonprofits.
A different tactic needs to be tried, and that doesn’t mean “slave labor.” but, it does mean, in some case, involuntary addiction programs based on, as you point to, those that work in other countries. Clearly ours do not work.
We can’t even support our vets coming back with PTSD, way too many of them ends up as homeless drug addicted on the streets. So how could we suddenly afford to handle more people?
I wasn’t talking about putting them in a black hole for the rest of their lives. Prisons are cheap, it’s a big business and can easily be expanded by adding more prisoners per cell and some more minimum wage guards
For mentally ill people, like Vets with PTSD, or drug addictions you need doctor, nurses, medication, treatment centers, single rooms…. these costs are many times higher than a prison. And as you are talking about letting them out later, that means they have to get treatment.
So no, the cost is enormous, so many people living on the streets currently and a majority of them suffers either by mental illness or drug addictions or both
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To be fair, most of our welfare programs are totally half-baked. And yes, I do agree that it can occur that throwing money at the problem is not the sole solution either. But when you put out a half baked program (because you don’t want to spend TOO much taxpayer money!) and it produces substandard results… Who’s surprised. I think the fundamental difference in welfare outcomes here vs elsewhere is, again, this band-aid approach.
We place emphasis on programs which start when people are in hard times, instead of emphasizing preventing hard times in the first place. Obviously they happen, but it’s the difference between landing on the concrete and a mattress. And the programs in other countries are available to people regardless of income, leading again to a lot less childhood poverty and generally to better outcomes later in life with that, but also to increased education and countless positive extremities (healthcare readily comes to mind, people see doctors more readily, which helps to reduce the chance of seriously invasive procedures later on; this doesn’t even begin to mention dying of preventable causes because no money for care). Economic mobility tends to be much higher in countries that sufficiently provide for their citizens – west, central, and northern Europe are generally highlights, but even Britain despite it’s huge amount of landlordism and generally more meagre incomes such still manages quite a bit greater economic mobility than we do. The American dream is easier to achieve there than here, even if it might be scaled down to European proportions (a nice house or flat instead of a mcmansion and a well comfortable income rather than unacceptably large riches).
The thought of what the US could be like with just half the money of all the multi billionaires instead going to employees and communities…
For sure. I’m not against this, fundamentally, but that’s also not what’s happening.
And I think the most meaningful element of this is providing a way to meaningful employment for those who had menial jobs prior to addiction/affliction. And providing folks with a sufficiently comprehensive societal net to catch them before they hit the bottom.
If feel like I’m repeating myself, and I do, it’s certainly tiring for you to read 
sorry hahaha. Don’t know if you read all of the somewhat disorganized comments I posted above, but I appreciate an actual thoughtful response regardless.
We are totally agreed; I’m not saying we should. I’m saying we could, if the political will was there, afford to make it happen. I don’t think it SHOULD.
I think if you read the rest of my comment above (long, I know) you’ll get what I meant…
Brevity is the soul of wit. Unfortunately, I just might not be all that witty:rofl:
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I think it’s more of a break the bone to reset the leg.
The non profits have been shit at this. Let’s see how putting sick people in hospital wards and getting them clean first works.
Ever seen a day time crack whore surfing down a street or a person on fentanyl frozen bent over at the waist? Pick them up and take them away. No one needs to see that, and more importantly they need help to not be a public nuisance or a danger to themselves.
Lol I am just certain the Trump administration is going to treat them quite humanely through all of this. You know, in keeping with their unmatched track record of being humane and compassionate. 
Trump surely wouldn’t leverage this vulnerable population in any way. No siree, not the Christian Man I know!
Fascist anti crime policies violate civil rights, who could have guessed? Anyway, who needs rights and the democratic franchise when you have rank stupidity
They literally can’t indict a ham sandwich.
