The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores and make them terrible. You don't need to lock them up indefinitely, but you do need to move them somewhere else where they won't have hugely negative effects on the city and its populace. It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either, while it will make life for everyone else substantially better -- and we should be prioritizing the welfare of the productive members of society who actually pay to make all of it possible. Right now way too many cities have lost the plot by being too permissive of violations of the social contract, and everyone suffers as a result.
I hate the messaging of “for the actual taxpayers” phrase even if I agree mostly with the sentiment.
There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.
Exactly. You don't pay taxes to pay taxes, you pay taxes for the collective benefits you get out of it. Paying taxes and not getting the benefits of safe cities, clean roads, parks, and all the other things that government does, then you are living life only to pay taxes.
You get collective benefit even if you live in the woods. You can’t opt-out because you don’t opt out of the benefit.
You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.
You can be a nomad in the woods and not earn income, and you’ve essentially avoided most taxes unless you own the woods. You’d pay taxes on your woodland because the government protects it from forest fires, criminals entering, war, etc. As a nomad in the woods you’re still eligible for food stamps, you’re still eligible for Medicare and if you go to the hospital and can’t pay, the government protects you from being turned away.
Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
>You can leave the country and stop paying taxes, you just can’t come back.
No, you can't. You have to renounce your US Citizenship to stop paying taxes in the US, no matter where you live. Renouncing requires acquiring citizenship in a new country, which isn't that easy: just ask anyone who's tried to naturalize in the US.
>Again, you’re part of a society and you can’t opt out, even if you don’t want to pay.
You're not really a part of the society if you don't live there, but if you're a US Citizen, you're still required to pay both federal and state taxes, even if you've never lived in the US in the first place.
Acquiring another citizenship before renouncing is a given, since you can't legally be stateless. How else would it work?
In any case, I've never renounced a citizenship, but I can imagine countries making it hard. Is the process itself difficult, are there requirements other than the international law one of not being stateless?
Renouncing isn't hard for most people, except Americans who have to pay thousands of dollars in fees. Acquiring the new citizenship is what's hard; most decent countries don't just hand that out.
The point is that of course you have to find citizenship in another country before renouncing your only other citizenship, otherwise you'd have no citizenship.
The argument of getting something for the taxes you pay is made because people can vote away taxes.
But yes, it's a troubling argument, because once people start thinking that way they feel like they're owed something. Large swaths of the elderly and the infirm may not be paying taxes but are absolutely owed things that often cost money just because they're a fellow citizen and a member of our society.
Well, I agree halfway… at the core of any social contract are rights and obligations. I think part of those obligations are to contribute to society (I think we agree up to this point)
However, I believe a part of that contribution has to be in an objective, quantifiable way - which translates to taxes. The rights we consume from society are tangible and expensive. A city populated only by of poets would collapse of starvation after 12 hours…
That said, if a Society feels they need to foster a specific part of it (culture,social work, etc) they can enact tax breaks to reduce the financial load of those making that contribution.
That sounds very short sighted. You are preconditioned on all of your ancestors having kids. Everything you like, love, care about was created by someone who was first created by their parents. If not for those people there would be nothing.
Raising children is the greatest, riskiest, and costliest contribution to the world most of us can make. It should be respected.
I didn't ask my ancestors to screw, thanks. I mean, good for them, I guess? But I wish people would stop insinuating that having children is the pinnacle of human achievement, when, in fact, it's actually the bare minimum. I wish they would realize that not everyone needs to have children (the math alone simply doesn't work out on a finite planet...), and I wish they wouldn't cast aspersions on those of us who choose to live the way we do. How about we go after the people who had kids but shouldn't have, instead?
The black and white question is - would you rather be dead? To the extent that your life is valuable, enjoyable, and meaningful - none of that joy/value/meaning would exist if your ancestors "didn't screw."
This is a real question, not a rhetorical one, and its answer is subjective to your values and experience. If your answer is something akin to "I am indifferent to whether I exist or not" then your entire argument is logically sound. On the flip side if you attach value to what you have and are, then it logically follows that if you have the chance to "ask your ancestors to screw" - you would.
As for "casting aspersions" and "going after" - that's not what I am doing here. You do you. The more interesting question is - which should society value and which should someone emulate based on their own values. That again goes back to the question I asked. If a view is contingent on someone feeling "meh" about their own existence, it's not a very appealing perspective.
> On the flip side if you attach value to what you have and are, then it logically follows that if you have the chance to "ask your ancestors to screw" - you would.
who will change your diapers when you need them again?
spoiler: if not your children, then someone else’s - the robots may not be sufficiently dexterous by that point.
it is fine to not want children. or to want them. to pretend either side is morally superior is rather foolish. practically speaking, you’re gonna need your diaper changed.
I have people with disabilities in my family so I know their realities up close - unlike most leftist politicians who only seek them for photo ops.
My wife volunteers pro-bono in a foundation that employs solely people with disabilities. They do work (according to their capacities), they get paid a wage, and they pay (little) taxes off it. And they are super proud that they can “pull their weight” and be equals in a society that tends to look down on them either as limited (usually from the right) or as “must-be-kept-cotton-balled” (usually from the left).
They want to be seen as people, which is what they are.
One of the big issues with severe disability is the stupidly low cap on assets to qualify for social programs (SS, Medicaid). It was set in the 70s at $2000 and hasn't been changed since.
This keeps people with severe disabilities out of the workforce more than anything else.
Those limits -all of them should follow inflation. The 10,000 you can carry on a plane, the amount you can deposit without scrutiny, etc. all had reasonable limits when set, but things have changed since the ‘70s except those caps.
For the disability cap, it should simply be eliminated. What do I care if some millionaire kid gets SS and Medicare? They are likely paying for it in taxes (or should be).
I'd rather that than have someone lose healthcare because they saved $15k (1970 2k in today's money). Or worse, because Grandma left them an inheritance not knowing the impact that has on their heath coverage.
Severe disability does not go away after your bank account hits 2k.
Just that at least in my country (not US), the left is slowly encroaching into a daily dictatorship on how to run our lives - and that includes regulations which might seem rosy to the general population but really hurt the people with disabilities. They don’t understand them, nor their families, nor care to listen and understand - they just legislate to show their audience that “they care”. And that includes photo ops and empty promises every four years.
“Zing! dang! Thank you madam! Your money is on the dresser. See you in four years when is reflection time”
I think we can assume it's because I came on unnecessarily sarcastic. But he seems to have rolled back from "tangible contributions are the only thing", which is nice.
Because despite significant variance, resisting to the lure of addiction using willpower is much more effective than using willpower to reconnect one's spine.
> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial. I think “productive members” has the same phrasing problems. We need to make life better for members of society that contribute and benefit from it, for people that want to be a part of society, regardless of their ability to contribute back.
This thread is about the extreme opposite of this, though. Taking from net contributors and using that money to create a place that's to their extreme detriment, because incredibly it's a votewinner, is the current situation.
We don’t have to get lost in philosophical questions of human worth here. We’re talking about addicts, not stay-at-home moms or other non-tax payers.
Maybe pathological addicts are also productive in some ways that we don’t appreciate? In any case: saying that addicts are “non-productive” does not imply that stay at home moms, poor artists, or retirees are unproductive (etc. etc.).
> Loosely, addiction can be useful-- the thrill seekers[...]
This seems like a strange conception of addiction, unless we aren't seriously comparing mountain climbing with heroin. If we are then I wonder what utility the classification of addiction is actually supposed to provide to us.
Drug addicts are victims of a very civilizational pathology, so more like the opposite of savages. I was more getting at whatever good they might do (?) in their own very informal societies—societies that most people either shy away from or are oblivious to, so it’s very difficult for most people to know whatever pro-social activities they do.
I think it's also bad messaging (even though I agree with the overall sentiment as well) because "paying taxes" and "being productive" are sliding scales rather than binary. And a lot of people can and do extend the argument to prioritizing people who pay the most taxes or the right kind of taxes or are productive in the right way. In the context of who a city is "for", it often becomes about prioritizing people who own their dwelling over those who rent, even though renters certainly meet the threshold of contributing to a society and paying taxes.
It seems possible to both agree with the idea that it's bad if a city's downtown is full of homeless drug addicts while disagreeing with the idea of trying to sort city residents into worthy and not worthy.
> There is more to life than paying taxes, and people contribute to society in many ways that aren’t financial.
What are they, and can I do them instead of paying taxes? Because paying taxes soaks up double digit percentages of my productive time and I reckon I could add a lot more value to society if I had alternatives.
You can provide art and music to the community, either by strumming your guitar aggressively at passers-by or turning up your boom box to max volume so everyone can hear your shitty music. /s
But our society rewards your societal contributions via monetary rewards which results in you paying taxes. Sure, the money you get does not necessarily reflect the value of you contributions fairly in most cases, but I think I can count on one hand the number of people I have met in my life that pay no taxes and are still a net benefit to society.
And not paying taxed can be because they have no job and make no money, or are so rich as to be able to write off all their income because they think they don’t owe anyone anything.
Did they say “all there is to life is to pay taxes”? You’re reading what you want to read and shifting the conversation. There is a social contract that the majority of the population voted for you like it or not. That’s what society is.
If you want to follow your own calendar, pay with your own money, not share your bread with the rest of the team, then don’t expect that team to pay for your needles, clean your poop, and also expect them to let you continue doing this indefinitely in the nicest parts of the town that was built with the shared bread of everyone else.
The “contribution to society” we agreed on at a monetary level is taxes. We agreed on it so hard that if I don’t pay them I go to jail. Why should I be happy to use that for people who don’t want to be part of that system?
What contribution to the greater society are hard drug users or homeless with mental issues without a recovery plan giving the society? Are they donating their time to clean up downtown? Trimming weeds? Walking old ladies across the street?
Why normalize this? The more permissive you get the less pressure there is on fixing it. I’m not saying jail like a thief or murderer would get, but why not make the decision for someone unable to do it themselves and enforce recovery?
What should a city do when the people that pay taxes and keep the machine chugging along decide to leave because the city is becoming an unbearable mess?
It's an honest question. Social programs cost money, and the money comes from taxes.
I am generally in favor of drugs being legalized and drug addiction being treated as a healthcare policy concern instead of a criminal concern. But the experiment seems to fail more often than not.
"Taxpayers" is a word people use when they want to say "workers" without the baggage of sounding like a communist. I don't think it's so much about paying taxes.
I agree but also think it goes further than that. The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society. Which is a separate discussion we could have, but I think it's especially disingenuous as a country still dealing with an opioid crisis. I know first hand people who went and paid for school, got jobs and healthcare, and became addicts. It literally happened to them (I chose that wording carefully) by being treated with over prescribed highly addictive substances.
The ones who are doing better have to actively make the decision every day to be "a productive member of society" and it's extremely difficult for them. Even though they may have been prone to addiction before their medications, this is still something that happened to them.
> The person you replied to also seems to act as if many of these people are actively choosing to not be tax payers and not be productive members of society.
A lot of people like this exist though. Toronto has a huge problem where the homeless refuse to go to shelters because they don't want to be told they can't use drugs. So they make the conscious decision to opt out of society and stay on the street.
There is no way to get through to people like this. Even if they had their own place they'd probably OD before the end of the week with all their extra comfort and freedom they have. Some people can't be helped and that needs to be something people are more willing to accept.
As for your friends, popping opioids like candy is a poor decision even if your doctor is prescribing it to you. Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions. The opioid crisis is not society's fault.
> Intelligent, educated, and capable adults should be held accountable for their own decisions when they turn out to be poor decisions.
Rarely I'll state something so strongly - this is true at face value but in the context you meant it is so fundamentally wrong it borders insanity.
The entire reason we have regulation and reputation-based systems in place (like diplomas from accredited universities, or the bar, etc.) is to allow the individual to delegate decisions to specialists. That is why practicing medicine without appropriate training is a crime (in most/all countries I know of).
Do you also want me to get out of my car and do some quick analysis of the structural integrity of every bridge I'm going to cross? Or are you goin to blame me if the bridge collapses and kills me?
Again, back to the case at hand - the whole purpose of having medical professionals is to follow their advice.
If they are prescribing you poison the solution is obviously to prosecute them through the judicial system, not undoying every trust-based system that makes complex professions in society even remotely possible/functional
The sad reality is that current forms of law enforcement aren't working when it comes to hard drugs and addiction. Putting people in prison for getting addicted to crack is not exactly going to make anyones lifes better. But it has also become quite obvious that you can't have free-range junkies shooting up in what is supposed to be the economic center of a city.
I suspect in a few decades forced rehab will become the norm, once you start smoking crack or shooting up in the street. It's pretty obvious for anyone with eyes that at a certain point, homelessness, mental health issues and most importantly drug addiction cannot be covered by "individual freedom" anymore if you want to have a working society.
Of course, having police beat up and arrest or otherwise forcefully move addicts from one place to another or into the prison industrial complex is not likely to work.
You can't help a person if they don't want to be helped. At the very least you can remove them from the society to make it safe and maybe make the person rethink their life. By shielding a drug addict from the consequences of their wrong life choices you are preventing their potential rehabilitation, unless they've been lost completely, of course.
comment you are replying to said "forced rehab" - this is not sheltering people from the consequences of their actions, it's forcing them to accept them and change those actions.
Rather hard examples of this that I've seen have been locking someone up in the psychiatric ward to get them detoxing. Or I have a friend who is a Vietnam vet, who got addicted to heroin whilst there. He ended up getting injured and was in a full body cast for a bit. The doctor in charge of him decided it was a good time to get him sober, so he spent a couple agonising weeks in a full body cast suffering through heroin withdrawal, and he's been clean since.
So your plan is to lock them into psychiatric wards. Then let them out and they will be productive members of society because that's how it worked for someone who can back from Vietnam once you heard.
When they get out they don't have a family or job or support system to go back to. They won't seek drugs to ease those pains again?
I do feel like you somewhat misrepresented my comment.
I was clarifying the meaning of the previous comments.
FWIW, I did actually get locked up in a psych ward once, for reasons involving drug abuse, and while it was unpleasant, it probably did do me some good, although I did have a family and support system to go back to.
Furthermore, I'd like to point out that forcing someone to sober up does not mean that you don't help them in other ways, like providing them with a home and assigning someone to help them.
I think it's possible that just giving someone a home and a case worker if they're in the middle of an opiate addiction will not help them find a happy place in the world, and as such, supplementing such aid by using a bit of coercive force to help them kick some bad habits may, in the long run, leave them happier than otherwise.
finally, I apologise if I'm being too sensitive here, but perhaps you could make a slight effort to be a little nicer when conversating, honestly I did find your comment a bit hurtful.
The approach of giving an addict that is arrested on theft and other charges a choice of prison or treatment is used successfully (as successful as it can be) in many EU countries. Obviously this cannot work if nobody gets convicted for anything short of murder, the incentives don't work.
Unfortunately we have the police for dealing with violations, and when you have a (expensive) hammer everything starts to look like a nail. What I mean is, I agree with both viewpoints: something must be done (don't even bother saying taxpayers - the addicts don't have it easy either), and jail/beating is definitely not that thing. I know this was said already but seeing the actual situation I think it's worth repeating.
I think you can provide services (shelters, etc) AND crackdown with a view to cleaning the city for regular people (rather than just specifying taxpayers).
More than a service, bring back the projects. Yes there were problems with them the last time around, but the problem we have now seems worse on all fronts.
Absolutely agreed + the second you start shaming people for complaining about this you've lost the plot
People were getting ratfucked online for saying "I don't like watching people shit all over the sidewalk" - so you know what? They moved! Maybe out of Portland, maybe politically, but pretending that smoking fentanyl on the MAX is good and normal is just totally insane.
It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either
Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables
Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown?
I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away
> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like?
My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.
> Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere
It's absolutely easy. There is no faster way to kill a city. Drive away the people with money and businesses die, tax revenue plummets and it turns into an irrelevant backwater.
All this stuff costs money. It's always like this, "somebody" gotta go out there and solve these difficult problems. Nobody actually wants to be that somebody though. No one wants to step up and pay for it. If you try to make them pay, they leave.
The question also presumes a fixed number of homeless, which is obviously not true looking at the explosion of them we've had over the past decade. You can meaningfully reduce the number of homeless by (a) building a lot more housing, including especially the lowest rung on the housing ladder (weekly/daily-pay SROs), and (b) simply not tolerating them. When you tolerate something, you get more of it.
I appreciate the optimism, always, but I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Kinda like the people obsessed with FBI crime statistics (tho obviously you’re arguing in good faith, so not nearly as objectionable).
The poor in the US might be less likely to starve now than they were in 1933, but I really think the narrative that the US has been “solving” anything about poverty to be incredibly inaccurate. Some indicators (obviously an impossible point to prove either way):
Edit: WAY more importantly I thought about this claim more and maybe I’m giving it too much credit. Are you saying that the people in the Great Depression just didn’t have a good enough work ethic, but now we’ve scared people into having a good work ethic? Cause I don’t think that lines up with my experience in our society or knowledge of our history at all. IMO
Poverty isnt a synonym for sad or unable to save. The US has far less people living in poverty than ever before. Obviously weve got a long way to go but removing the worst living conditions people historically faced is a big accomplishment.
All very true! I should clarify: I’m objecting to the user above attributing that to US policies or culture. The general trend in the developed world away from abject poverty is fantastic and something to be thankful for. I guess I don’t have proof that trend isn’t globally based in “not tolerating poverty” where that’s implied to mean hardline/law-n-order type stances (AFAICT?), but that seems to clash with other countries more compassionate/socialist policies.
Another issue here is not making a distinction between poverty, and people who are near unable function within the system due to drug abuse or mental issues. These are different issues to solve. If you are unable to work due to disability, but otherwise functional in the modern world, then you can work your way through the path to getting back on your feet. What percentage of these people of the homeless? My guess is that the larger problem are those who are on the street due to drugs or mental issues. I don't know what it's like to be on Fentanyl, but some of the people in videos I have found don't seem to be in a state where they're thinking about a place to live.
Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.
Fixing the structural issues :). In a country where the minimum wage is 2x higher, where mental and physical health care is free, and where the real estate market is mostly controlled by private citizens rather than corporations, I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.
Tbh Portland didn’t really try to solve homelessness/poverty. Because it knows it can’t, at the city/county level. I mean, what would that even look like? The city taxes alone paying for a huge swath of free housing, at a time when middle class workers can barely afford to live here?
We need to come together as a country and civilization to solve this problem.
> I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away
The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.
The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”. Just to pick one.
I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not feel good in any way, and no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint.
> The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”.
This is not a structure. It's a situation.
> I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed
No - the only assumption is yours you're making here. No one is saying that.
> no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint
Sorry, I was unclear: I was trying to highlight the fact that this situation is far, far less common in other countries, namely those with single-payer healthcare. That seems like pretty solid evidence that it’s a structural issue, not just… idk, circumstance? Chance?
Otherwise sorry I misinterpreted you —- guess I’ll spend more time reading next time!
For sure, you have productive members who can execute unlimited violence in the name of law, why not using them to displace the poor and ill away from the streets completely? Clean em up from scum eh. A brilliant idea of a mindful reactionist. The soviets did this by the way, and they were able to completely hide the problem, however they never understood that showing it boldly on the streets to all the "taxpayers" is the first step to solution
