In the early 1970’s. the Fram oil filter company produced a
series of ads that said, “pay me now, or pay me later”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij1yDpfZI8Q
The message was simple. If you spend a little money on an oil change
and a new filter, you can prevent having to rebuild your engine.
The lesson from those long-ago ads can also be applied to
other parts of our lives.
One of those is the plight of homeless people.
The truth is, most of us are actually just a thin line away
from being homeless.
The link below is a story about a successful minister in
Naperville, Illinois, who lost virtually everything, but somehow managed to
survive and prosper:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2010/10/thin-red-line.html
Homeless people aren’t always dirty, smelly, and disheveled. The story below is about a man I met in Evanston, Illinois, who was one of the most cheerful (and well groomed) person that I have ever met.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/11/have-good-day.html
We’ve all seen people on various street corners with homemade
signs asking for help. Even if we never give them money, their existence costs our
society money, through homeless shelters, emergency room treatment, and food
banks.
Just last weekend, the CDC helped to prevent THOUSANDS of
people from becoming homeless by temporarily extending the eviction moratorium
that has been in place for more than a yar. Surprisingly, there may be a better
way to solve the problem
Ray
is a 55-year-old man in Vancouver, Canada. He used to live in an emergency
homeless shelter. But over the past couple years, he’s been able to pay for a
place to live and courses to prepare him for his dream job — in part because he participated in a study called
the New
Leaf Project.
The
study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in
partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It
identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past
two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in
Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.
“At first, I thought it was a little far-fetched —
too good to be true,” Ray said. “I went with one of the program representatives
to a bank and we opened up a bank account for me. Even after the money was
there, it took me a week for it to sink in.”
Over the next year, the study followed up with the
recipients periodically, asking how they were spending the money and what was
happening in their lives. Because they were participating in a randomized
controlled trial, their outcomes were compared to those of a control group: 65
homeless people who didn’t receive any cash. Both cash recipients and people in
the control group got access to workshops and coaching focused on developing
life skills and plans.
The results? The people who received cash
transfers moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain
financial security over the year of follow-up. They decreased spending on
drugs, tobacco, and alcohol by 39 percent on average, and increased spending on
food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports.
“Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that
people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations
for Social Change, told me.
The study, though small, offers a counter to the
myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational
decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their
situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things
or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that
cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either
decrease it or have no effect on it.
“I have been working with people experiencing
homelessness as a family physician for 16 years and I am in no way surprised
that the people who received this cash used it wisely,” Gary Bloch, a Canadian doctor who
prescribes money to low-income patients, told me.
“It should be fairly self-evident by now that
providing cash to people who are very low-income will have a positive effect,”
he added. “We have seen that in other work (conditional cash transfer programs
in Latin America, guaranteed annual income studies in Manitoba), and I would
expect a similar outcome here.”
What’s more, according to Foundations for Social
Change, giving out the cash transfers in the Vancouver area actually saved the
broader society money. Enabling 50 people to move into housing faster saved the
shelter system $8,100 per person over the year, for a total savings of
$405,000. That’s more than the value of the cash transfers, which means the
transfers pay for themselves.
“People think that the status quo is cheap, but it’s
actually incredibly expensive,” Williams said. “So why don’t we just give
people the cash they need to transform their lives?”
The benefits — and limitations — of giving people free money
Williams developed the idea for the New Leaf Project
when her co-founder sent her a link to a 2014 TED talk by the historian Rutger Bregman titled “Why we should give everyone a basic income.” It
argued that the most effective way to help people is to simply give them cash.
The general idea behind basic income — that the
government should give every citizen a monthly infusion of free money with no
strings attached — has gained momentum in the past few years, with several countries
running pilot programs to test it.
And the evidence so far shows that getting a basic
income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social
institutions, while reducing crime. Recipients
generally spend the money on necessities like food,
clothes, and utility bills.
But Williams and her collaborators decided that
rather than give people monthly payments, they’d give one big lump sum.
“The research shows
that if you give people a larger sum of cash up front, it triggers long-term
thinking,” as opposed to just keeping people in survival mode, Williams
explained. “You can’t think about maybe registering for a course to advance
your life when you don’t have enough money to put food on the table. The big
lump sum at the front end gives people a lot more agency.”
That’s what it did for Ray. In addition to getting
housing, he used the cash transfer to take the courses he needed to become a
front-line worker serving people with addictions. “Now I can work in any of the
shelters and community centers in the area,” he told me, adding that receiving
a cash transfer had felt like a vote of confidence. “It gives the person their
own self-esteem, that they were trusted.”
Not everyone was eligible for a cash transfer,
however. The study only enrolled participants who’d been homeless for under two
years, with the idea that early intervention most effectively reduces the risk
of people incurring trauma as a result of living without a home. And people
with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the
initiative. Williams said this was not out of a belief that there are
“deserving poor” and “undeserving poor” — a woefully persistent frame on
poverty — but out of a desire to avoid creating a risk of harm and
to ensure the highest likelihood of success.
“If there was null effect from people receiving the
cash, from an investor perspective it could be seen as a ‘waste of money’
because it didn’t actually demonstrate impact in somebody’s life,” Williams
said. “We just wanted to start small, and the idea is that with subsequent
iterations we’ll start relaxing those parameters.”
She also said it was a difficult decision to include
a control group of people who wouldn’t receive any cash, but ultimately, the
control group was deemed necessary to prove impact. “We knew that we needed the
rigor, because people would be skeptical about giving people cash. We wanted
that evidence base that can assuage some of people’s concerns when they want to
see the hard facts,” she told me.
Going forward, Foundations for Social Change is
trying to raise $10 million to scale up its cash transfer approach to multiple
cities across Canada. It plans to give out 200 cash transfers in the next
iteration, which will also be run as a randomized controlled trial. Based on
feedback from study participants and a Lived Experience Advisory Panel — a
group of people who’ve experienced homelessness — the charity will offer a new
array of non-cash supports to both the cash recipients and the control group,
including a free smartphone.
The charity also hopes to work with other
populations, like people exiting prison and people exiting sex work. To
Williams, the time feels ripe.
“I think the pandemic has really softened people’s
attitudes to the need for an emergency cash payment when people fall upon hard
times,” she said.
Although the study’s findings seem promising, they
have not yet undergone peer review. Plus, it’s worth noting that cash on its
own probably isn’t enough to end homelessness.
“While I have no problem with providing cash to
people who need money, the solution to homelessness is housing,” Bloch told me.
“Especially in a city like Vancouver where housing supply is low and rents are
astronomical, it will be very hard to sustain a homelessness intervention
without offering long-term affordable housing. I would not want to see these findings used to take
pressure off the critical need to provide both long-term affordable housing and
long-term income security.”
That said, Bloch added, “If this study serves to
counteract some people’s perception that people who are homeless and/or
low-income can’t be trusted with extra income, that’s great. It’s a myth we
need to bury once and for all.”
I know that giving money away can actually cost less than what
you are already doing, but the program in Vancouver actually SAVED $8100 per
person in the first year of the program.
Now, let’s about sex, and how the same principle applies
there.
Colorado
has offered free birth control since 2011, leading to: a 40 percent drop in
unintended pregnancy, a 42 percent drop in abortions, and millions of dollars
in healthcare savings. The program involved long-acting reversible contraceptives
(LARC), such as IUD’s, not birth control pills. For every dollar invested in the LARC
program, an estimated average of $5.85 was avoided within a three-year period
by the Colorado Medicaid program—a good return on investment. The birth rate
for Medicaid-eligible women ages 15 to 24 dropped sharply each year between
2010 and 2012. CDPHE estimates that Colorado saved
between $49 million and $111 million in birth-related Medicaid costs.
Now that you have absorbed THAT information, it’s time to
strap on your helmet, and walk gingerly through a mine field.
It’s surprising how many conservative legislators do not
understand the fact that if a woman is NOT pregnant, there will be no need (or
desire) to get an abortion.
The number of abortions has decreased virtually every year
since 1973, The peak year was 1990, when a Republican (George H.W. Bush) was
president. The last time that the number went up was in 2002, when his son
(George W. Bush) was president.
Between 2011 and 2016, One hundred and sixty-two abortion clinics closed in the
United States, which is reportedly faster than at any other time since the 1973
Supreme Court decision Roe
v. Wade.
In data compiled by
Bloomberg Businessweek released Wednesday, since 2011, 162 clinics have closed
while 21 new ones have opened.
Six states (Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota,
South Dakota, and West Virginia) only have one clinic to serve the entire
state.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/29/health/six-states-with-1-abortion-clinic-map-trnd/index.html
As you might expect, the abortion rate is generally higher in
“blue” states, but that is not always the case. Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North
Carolina, Kansas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Arizona are all
in the “higher than average” category, due to the fact that the scarcity of clinics means
that it is more difficult to obtain contraception and family planning services.
If a woman cannot get access to reliable family planning and contraceptives, she is MORE likely to either (1) have an increased need/desire for an abortion or (2) require financial assistance (housing, SNAPP benefits and child tax credits). As a society, we would save money if we had MORE family planning clinics, not fewer.
The most obvious example of the “pay me now or pay me later” creed is infrastructure. Fortunately, Congress managed to pass a bi-partisan infrastructure bill this week, and a larger companion bill may pass in the near future.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/08/09/infrastructure-vote-senate-budget/
There are more than 617,000 bridges across the United States.
Currently, 42% of all bridges are at least 50 years old, and 46,154, or 7.5% of
the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition.
Unfortunately, 178 million trips are taken across these structurally deficient
bridges every day. In recent years, though, as the average age of America’s
bridges increases to 44 years, the number of structurally deficient bridges has
continued to decline; however, the rate of improvements has slowed. A recent
estimate for the nation’s backlog of bridge repair needs is $125 billion. We
need to increase spending on bridge rehabilitation from $14.4 billion annually
to $22.7 billion annually, or by 58%, if we are to improve the condition. At
the current rate of investment, it will take until 2071 to make all of the
repairs that are currently necessary, and the additional deterioration over the
next 50 years will become overwhelming. The nation needs a systematic program
for bridge preservation like that embraced by many states, whereby existing
deterioration is prioritized and the focus is on preventive maintenance.
West Virginia has the highest percentage of structurally deficient
bridges, a fact that Joe Manchin needs to pay attention to.
Failure to maintain and inspect bridges can have devastating
consequences, which you can see in the video below:
When a Bridge Falls: Disaster in Minneapolis | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube
By now, of course, you have absorbed a lot of information, but the message is still the same.
Pay me now, or pay me later.
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