What happens after 18 months when there’s no money?
Housing all homeless folks for 18 months isn’t a policy suggestion, it’s a demonstration of just how much money we are dealing with. It’s there to make a point.
BUT if you are interested in Housing First Initiatives (in which the focus is, you guessed if, getting homeless people into free housing FIRST) the general idea is that it is for a limited amount of time, giving people a period of time to effectively seek out treatment if needed, connect with other support systems as needed, and find employment, and otherwise put themselves into a position where they can begin ti pay for their own housing by the end of that period. It’s a GREAT approach that has been proven to be high effective (and MORE effective, in fact, than treatment first initiatives.)
So, in this hypothetical where we are able to enroll ALL 500k homeless Americans in a Housing First program for 18 months, at the end of that 18 months, the vast majority of them would no longer need the program.
BUT ALSO- you know that people are supposed to pay taxes EVERY year right? Now, I dunno how many years of backlogged taxes that 8.4 BILLION dollars is, but presumably they would continue to pay taxes from then on, which would provide additional funding for this kind of project. (Which, again, isn’t an actual proposal, but a rhetorical scenario.)
None of what you said in the middle two paragraphs is implied—nowhere does it mention Housing First Initiative. From what I can tell in my limited knowledge of this, additional taxes would be a rather bad thing. I know very little about tax policy, so I cannot comment on billionaires getting out of taxes. Do you have any sources proving that certain people like Bezos don’t actually pay taxes?
However, I must say that the Housing First Initiative does sound pretty cool, though I don’t know how effective it would be.
I mean, when people are ACTUALLY proposing that we “give homeless people houses”, they tend to be referring to Housing First Initiatives. (And again, these tweets don’t represent an actual program proposal. But the idea of giving people houses is like…. a thing.)
And, as I’ve said, Housing First Initiatives ARE effective.
Now, this tweet is from 2019. In 2020 Amazon did actually have to pay SOME taxes, but they hadn’t in 2019 or 2018. This is EASILY found just by googling “does Amazon pay taxes.”
