Tag: poverty

Supreme Court allows cities to enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outside

The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors, even in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking.

The case is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.

In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court reversed a ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

The majority found that the 8th Amendment prohibition does not extend to bans on outdoor sleeping bans.

“Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. “A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding ‘how best to handle’ a pressing social question like homelessness.”

He suggested that people who have no choice but to sleep outdoors could raise that as a “necessity defense,” if they are ticketed or otherwise punished for violating a camping ban.

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On Wealth Inequality, the Left Has a Point

The federal government has been waging a war against the middle class and working poor since at least 1970. Wealth inequality has steadily increased since the early 1970s, and it’s not a coincidence. It’s a result of a series of policies. The government wants the masses of American working people broke, propertyless, and dependent upon elected officials for the crumbs they give back as handouts from taxes taken.

The most insidious attack on working people has been inflation, which really took off when the federal government decoupled the dollar from gold in 1971.

The inflation tax is the most regressive tax that currently exists in federal policy.

Inflation always taxes wages twice, once when the labor is performed and the worker is awaiting payment, and again when the wages are deposited into the worker’s checking account. But inflation leaves the rich man’s yacht untaxed.

No level of inflation, no matter how high, can ever take one cent of value away from a yacht. A yacht is always going to be a yacht, no matter what the value of money is.

Inflation taxes the poor man’s rent he advances to his landlord, but leaves private jets and vacation homes untaxed.

Want to know where this inflation tax goes? The stolen value of the inflation tax doesn’t just vanish out of thin air.

Some of it goes to the government; economists even have a name for the benefit government draws from the inflation tax. It’s called “seigniorage.”

Rich people generally don’t pay the inflation tax, and many of them benefit from it. Let’s say you’re a billionaire real estate mogul, not unlike Donald Trump, with a net-worth of $1 billion. You buy houses and real estate, and when you get your 20% equity, you pull that equity out and invest it into another real estate holding. So you have properties worth $5 billion, net assets of $1 billion, and (with only 20% equity in your properties) you also have $4 billion in mortgage debt.

4% inflation lowers the value of the mortgage debt you owe, since with CPI inflation you’re just going to raise the rent 4% next year. Inflation created by the Federal Reserve Bank becomes a gift of $160 million annually to your net worth ($4 billion x 0.04).

Every year.

And it enriches them more if inflation exceeds 4%, as it has in recent years.

If the CPI is 10% (as it nearly was in 2022), inflation alone adds 40% ($400 million) to this real estate mogul’s net worth. That doesn’t count the decrease in the nominal debt paid off by the real estate mogul’s tenants.

And this assumes the value of his property holdings is only increasing at the rate of CPI inflation, which it’s vastly exceeding, thanks to Federal Reserve Bank interest rate manipulation and federal housing subsidies and incentives.

Inflation enriches the real estate mogul with a boatload of mortgages that are now easier to pay off. It also benefits the hedge fund speculator and the banker, who are in the very businesses of being in debt.

In other words, the inflation tax makes the value of money flow directly from the wallets of wage-earners to the vaults of rich people who work with debt.

As long as the working man holds money in his possession, whether in the form of credit to his employer for his labor, in his pocket, or in his checking account, inflation taxes him. Only when the money is finally no longer due to him does the inflation tax end.

Working people know this truth intuitively because inflation raises prices at the grocery store, at the hardware store, at the department store, and the price of real estate.

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27% of Americans Are Skipping Meals Because of Skyrocketing Food Costs, Survey Shows

The price of food has jumped by 25% since the start of the pandemic — even more if you factor in the cost of a quick trip to the store, which takes into consideration the price of fuel. Now, a new study says there are some major ramifications.

Intuit Credit Karma, which provides information about financial products, says that more than one-quarter of the people it surveyed said they have skipped meals or sacrificed other spending due to rising costs. The survey of 2,011 adults was conducted online in the United States during the week of May 7. 

According to the survey, 28% said they are putting off paying for necessities, such as rent or other bills, to afford groceries — while 27% say they are occasionally skipping meals. Another 18% have applied for or have considered applying for food stamps and other types of assistance, and 15% rely on or have considered visiting food banks for their groceries.

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San Francisco opens city’s first $5 million taxpayer-funded free food ‘market’

San Francisco opened its first $5.5 million free food “market”, where approved residents can show a benefits eligibility card, put what they want in their carts, check out to keep track of outgoing inventory, and leave without paying.

The Bayview-Hunters Point facility aims to be a food pantry alternative that replicates the supermarket experience in an area where many grocery stores have come but few have remained due to high crime.

The 4000-square foot District 10 Market is the first of San Francisco’s food empowerment “markets” funded by the San Francisco’s Human Services Agency. Eligible individuals receive a Costo-like benefits card that allows use of the facility once per month. Eligibility is limited to individuals who live within one of three zip codes, be verified social services clients, have dependents under 25 or a qualified food-related illness, and be referred by one of eleven community organizations in the market’s referral network.

Geoffrea Morris, who spearheaded San Francisco’s Food Empowerment Market legislation in 2021 while working for a county supervisor and is a senior consultant for the District 10 Market, explains the program is meant to supplement food stamps that run out towards the end of the month, especially due to rising food costs from inflation.

“This is a supplemental source for food. Food stamps should be the primary source. This is a supplemental source especially close to the end of the month when families are facing the pain, especially with inflation,” Morris told The Center Square.

The facility is designed to closely replicate the supermarket experience, with individuals’ items weighed and scanned upon “check-out” to keep track of inventory and manage supply chains. District 10 Market, which is operating on a $5.5 million grant from San Francisco, uses taxpayer funds to purchase high-quality fresh produce from Rodriguez Brothers Ranch in Watsonville, and largely relies on donations from other grocery stores for its shelf-stable items and toiletries.

“If we didn’t tell you it was free you’d think you’d have to pay,” Morris said.

Morris also detailed how District 10 Market’s referral process is meant to ensure use of wraparound services.

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The National Debt Is Making Us Poorer

Many Americans are unhappy about years of higher-than-normal inflation that have sapped buying power and reduced standards of living.

Now, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) demonstrates that a difficult culprit will make you feel poorer over the next few decades: The nearly $35 trillion (and growing) national debt.

At its current trajectory, the rising national debt—and the increasing burden of making interest payments on it—will reduce Americans’ future income growth by 12 percent over the next 30 years, the CBO projects in a new report. That means the average person will earn about $5,000 less annually than they would in a scenario where the debt was not growing.

“This is the result of crowding out, whereby a higher national debt reduces private investment and slows income growth,” explain the number crunchers at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for reducing the federal deficit. “With additional debt, income growth would slow further.”

If the national debt grows faster than the CBO currently expects—something that could happen due to wars, pandemics, or simply because lawmakers in Washington can’t cure their addiction to borrowing—the average person could miss out on $14,000 annually in future income gains that won’t materialize, the CRFB predicts.

That crowding-out effect is a serious threat to future economic growth. There are a finite number of dollars in the economy in any given year, and each dollar that has to be taxed away to make an interest payment on the debt is a dollar that cannot be invested, spent, or paid to an employee.

The costs of rising debt can be a bit difficult to understand because we don’t see reductions in potential earnings as obviously as we see price increases at the grocery store. Still, the effect is pretty similar. Americans’ experience with inflation in recent years is helpful in understanding how the cost of the national debt depresses living standards.

In the CBO’s baseline model, average earnings are expected to climb from about $84,000 this year to $123,000 in 2054, 30 years from now. That sounds great, except for the fact that average earnings would have climbed to about $128,000 by 2054 in a scenario where the national debt was stable and not growing.

To someone living in 2054, that $5,000 won’t feel real because it never existed. But it would have existed, if not for the poor decisions by federal officials in the 2010s and 2020s.

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Homelessness After Age 50 Is Rising

Imagine you are 82 years old, barely making ends meet on a fixed Social Security check and getting a $1,300 bill to fix a burst water pipe. Imagine being 51, years away from Social Security, and losing your low-wage job because a new medical diagnosis forces you to give up your driver’s license in a place with no public transit. Or imagine being 70, experiencing memory loss and forgetting to pay your bills.

In these all-too-common scenarios, eviction and homelessness lurk around the corner. People aged 50 and older are the fastest-growing group of people experiencing homeless in the United States. They make up nearly half of the homeless population, and their numbers are estimated to triple by 2030.

Some older adults have been on the brink of or experienced homelessness at some point during their lives, especially if they struggled to find stable, good-paying jobs or if they suffer from substance use or mental health disorders.

Meanwhile, recent years have witnessed an alarming increase in the number of Americans over 50 experiencing homelessness for the first time. When they should be enjoying some hard-earned rest after decades of work, too many are losing their homes and ending up in shelters or on the streets.

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Maybe We’re Closer to ‘You’ll Own Nothing’ Than We Realize

The World Economic Forum’s catchphrase you’ll own nothing and be happy was widely mocked as an eyebrow-raising vision of a “sharing economy” future without the implicit agency granted by full ownership. Renting stuff that one needed only for one-time use has long been a market, and car-sharing makes sense for urban dwellers who only need a vehicle on occasion.

But to own nothing still implies powerlessness and poverty, not happiness, which continues to be associated with owning income streams and nice things, i.e. wealth.

Given our dependence on software / digital rights and the phantom wealth of credit-asset bubbles,”how much do we actually own?” is a fair question. Consider the recent New York Times article Why Tech Companies Are Not Your Friends: Lessons From Roku, which was reprinted in other publications with the more accurate title Our Gadgets Are Not Ours.

The gist of the article is that since we don’t own control of the software, our “ownership” of the device is illusory. Here is an excerpt:

More than a decade ago, when we bought a TV it was just that–a big screen that let you plug into it whatever you wanted. Nowadays, the vast majority of TVs connect to the internet and run the manufacturer’s operating system and apps. Even though you bought the TV, the software component, a major part of what makes the product work, remains controlled by the company.

Changes to the product’s software interface and data collection practices can happen at any moment. In extreme examples, a device can stop working. In 2020, for instance, Amazon deactivated the Echo Look, a camera that helped people organize their wardrobes. It issued a promotional credit for owners to buy a different Amazon gadget that lacked similar features.

The less extreme, more common situation is when companies stop supporting older products because they need to sell new gadgets. Apple’s original Apple Watch from 2015, for example, no longer gets software updates and now barely works.

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San Francisco buys vodka shots for homeless alcoholics in taxpayer-funded program

The City of San Francisco is providing free beer and vodka shots to homeless alcoholics at taxpayer expense under a little-known pilot program. 

The “Managed Alcohol Program” operated by San Francisco’s Department of Public Health serves regimented doses of alcohol to voluntary participants with alcohol addiction in an effort to keep the homeless off the streets and relieve the city’s emergency services. Experts say the program can save or extend lives, but critics wonder if the government would be better off funding treatment and sobriety programs instead.

“Established in countries such as Canada and Australia, a managed alcohol program is usually administered by a nurse and trained support staff in a facility such as a homeless shelter or a transitional or permanent home, and is one method to minimize harm for those with alcohol use disorder,” the California Health Care Foundation explains in an 2020 article describing the pilot program. 

“By prescribing limited quantities of alcohol, the model aims to prevent potentially life-threatening effects of alcohol withdrawal, such as seizures and injuries.” 

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Ohio Pastor Criminally Charged for Letting People Sleep In Church. Again.

An Ohio pastor is once again being brought up on criminal charges for sheltering people in his church.

On Friday, the city of Bryan, Ohio refiled charges against Chris Avell, the pastor of Dad’s Place, for fire and zoning code violations related to his operation of a 24-hour “Rest and Refresh” ministry at the church’s downtown building.

The city argues the church’s 24-hour ministry is in fact just a residential homeless shelter, which is not allowed at the commercially zoned property. The fire code violations make it not only unauthorized but also unsafe. Each violation, if not corrected, is punishable by a $1,000 daily fine.

“We appreciate that Dad’s Place has tried to help people in need,” said Bryan Mayor Carrie Schlade in a statement. “But putting these people’s lives at risk in the case of a fire or other dangers is not helping them.”

“Here we are with the pastor facing new criminal charges for caring for people inside his church,” First Liberty Institute attorney Jeremy Dys, who is representing Dad’s Place, told Reason in an interview on Friday.

Reason covered Avell’s case back in January when he was first charged with 18 criminal counts for similar zoning and fire code violations.

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Greenpeace Crusade Will Blind and Kill Children

Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups have logged a win in a crusade that could ultimately blind and kill thousands of children annually. How? By persuading the Court of Appeals of the Philippines to issue a scientifically ignorant and morally hideous decision to ban the planting of vitamin A–enriched golden rice. The objective result will be more children blinded and killed by vitamin A deficiency.

The World Health Organization estimates that 250,000–500,000 children who are vitamin A–deficient become blind every year, and half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight. In addition, children with immune systems weakened by vitamin A deficiency have an increased risk of illness and death from infectious diseases.

The court also banned the planting of an eggplant variety that has been biotech-enhanced to resist insect pests. The same variety approved by Bangladeshi regulators has reduced pesticide usage and improved farmers’ yields by more than 50 percent.

In their press release, Greenpeace activists crowed, “The Court of Appeals has essentially put a moratorium on these genetically modified crops.”

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