this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I'm not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.

For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:

Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.

reference

Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

A more useful question to address homelessness would be "why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?"

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

if the world weren't so hostile to normal humans then not having the support of a family would not be as devastating

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I'm not sure that I agree... a family is a lot more than a source of economic support. No amount of less hostile world can substitute for the social, cultural, educational or psychological functions of a family, and becoming a self-supporting adult has a lot to do with mental well-being (in addition to the economic aspects).

Maybe if there were less economic pressure overall there would be more functional families and ultimately fewer children in the foster care system... but that's really just conjecture and I'm not sure how you'd go about trying to support such an argument with research.

I'm also curious how you define "hostile" and "normal humans" in this context.

[–] Supernova1051 2 points 1 week ago

Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

billions in dollars taken from billionaires to help them for a few more years would absolutely help. maybe not all of them, but any that it does help would be well worth it. billionaires don't need more than one yacht.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's so brutal. The foster system is also really strange, from my broad thousand-foot view of it.

Maybe I'm way off base but it feels like some weird dispassionate state shuffle system where kids don't get a stable family situation, they just get passed around a series of "halfway homes", develop psychological problems from these constant disruptions in their development because duh, and then suddenly are "of age" and booted out to go work or something. (And likely end up on the street? Shocker!)

(This constant attempt to reinstitute child labor scares me even more in this context)

My wife and I were consulting various sources about adoption. We basically found out adoption is like some weird underground "baby market" that obviously favors the rich, and prices different genetics traits differently. (YEP!)

Directed to the foster system, it sounds like you just end up as a revolving door extension of a failed, undercut, under funded social program that "processes" kids through your house like inmate transfers.

No wonder statistics are so grim! My research suggests to me it was a replacement for the antiquated orphanage system of old but... Sheesh was it really an improvement? (Of the best examples, for the sake of argument, not the worst ones).

All this rabble rabble about abortion being legal or not, but it could be legal again universally, tomorrow, and conservatives wouldn't have to worry about it actually happening so often if they fixed their freaking obtuse child-as-market-product system. If they actually cared about children, that is. Fat chance they'll even think of that though.

Sorry I didn't know this was such a button with me but I hope I added to the conversation LOL. Thanks for your post. <3 So many people are just...invisible. And it's heartbreaking.