Seattle homelessness spending tops $90 million:
In 2015, the year former Mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency over homelessness, Seattle budgeted about $50 million to address the crisis. Four years later, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s recently released budget proposal calls for about $90 million in homelessness spending next year, and Seattle’s City Council is looking to add more.
It’s a extremely basic lesson of economics. If you subsidize something you will get more of it. By making it easier for people to live with little or no income more people are tempted to go that route and to move here from other places.
Ah, but wholesale coercive redistribution under a Central Planning Authority is “compassion” don’t you know, and thus required, meaning that property rights are in the way and thus evil.
No one would be homeless anyway without the “greedy” asserting their property rights, thus the homeless deserve your house and you don’t. Because your kind made them homeless in the first place, them taking your home is only a first step in achieving justice.
In South Africa this is already law; if you leave your property unoccupied for a while and someone moves in while you’re away, you have no legal standing to put them out.
Seattle, far from being radical in their authoritarian thinking, is behind the times in getting it implemented. “If you subsidize something you will get more of it.” They know that as well as anyone, and since they are subsidizing social justice they’re getting more of it. Though it’s not nearly enough it is at least a start. When a few homeless are escorted by police, to move into your house, by order of the mayoral Homelessness Mitigation Committee or whatever, they’ll be getting only a little bit farther.
Plus, if you start to tax incomes and transactions and things to cover the increasing costs of subsidizing homeless people, thanks to the increases in taxes, the costs of living rise so much that many jobs no longer support a person, even in a small, cheap apartment, that the income line at which Homelessness occurs rises throughout the economy.