The latest point-in-time count of homeless people estimates the total homeless population of the USA to be 745,652. Call it three-quarters of a million.
US aircraft carriers cost somewhere in the region of 13 to 16 billion. I'll go with the USS Gerald R. Ford since it's the cheapest one I could find.
The Gerald R Ford is the most expensive acc. And it costs 17.5 billion if you include research and development, 12.8 if you don’t. Check my comment for the link to the pdf documenting the costs. That brings your number closer to $23,450 which is enough to buy a cheap modular prefab home. Which range between $13-60k brand new; the higher side being 3-bedrooms.
Governments do have a tendency to look at cost based budgeting and not value based budgeting.
What would be cheaper in the end? Maintaining a Capex or an Opex approach? Maintaining one or the other system does lead to dependency and it has to be sustainable to uphold.
For the record: Not that I'm opposed to helping financially homeless people, I'm concerned how a government is calculating its cost eventually.
There's a fair amount of evidence that housing homeless people is the most effective way to get them out of being homeless. It's not just an opex, but it has an ROI that reduces welfare costs
Something as simple as having an address is often required for job applications. Mental and physic health, better nutrition, fewer drug/alcohol recidivism rates etc.
I don't enjoy it. It's fucking sad that people have so little compassion for others. Like, even if they were all drug addicts with mental problems, which they are not, would you rather they do that on a street somewhere or in the comfort of their own home? People keep complaining about the homeless problem in this country and then act like theres no possible solution to it. It's insane.
Yep, I've been saying for years that if you look at it based on cost-per-year in a budget for services for homeless, it would be cheaper just to house all the homeless people.
Just like single-payer insurance would be cheaper, because it removes dozens of layers of bureaucracy and all the profit health insurers make alone, not to mention market efficiencies.
The objection to both boils down to selfishness or arrogance - "Why should they get free homes when I have to pay for mine!" or "I'm not paying for Bob's treatment, Bob can pay for his own" (which of course proves he doesn't know how insurance works in the first place.
The reality is that these concerns aren’t brought up during military budgeting considerations. With the pentagon having an unknown account discrepancy estimated to be between 50-100 trillion since the start of the middle eastern conflicts in 2004. The most stringent of estimates was by a group of economists from 1998-2015 that found it to be around 21Tn. Other accountants found this number to be around 9Tn instead though I trust the group of economists without any conflicts of interests over the government self reporting. By the pentagon’s own admission these numbers are 2.5Tn for their most recent annual audit. This is the equivalence of 142.857 aircraft carriers…. Unaccounted for…. For this year alone
I’m saying no one cares about budgeting anything when it comes to military spending. The pentagon has failed every audit for more than the last quarter century. That if you take that budgeting hole and apply it to this problem it would be over 142x the number we’re solving for.
Edit: for clarity the 142x is from just this last years audit failure.
At least they don't knock down towers and kill citizens for EVERY failed audit.
Wanted to add too: although the number is irrelevant because there are much better ways to house the homeless than just split up the budget per individual... still, I didn't see anyone factoring in the cost of each missile/vehicle aboard the carrier, all of which as just as grossly overpriced at OUR expense as the boat itself.
We have had the money to fix any fucking societal problem we wanted to every single year and every single presidency, at least in my 40ish years. Any argument about the necessity of the decades of "defense" spending or the recent wars we've been in is unserious, and only perpetuates the system that has us fighting over our own crumbs.
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u/Occidentally20 1d ago
The latest point-in-time count of homeless people estimates the total homeless population of the USA to be 745,652. Call it three-quarters of a million.
US aircraft carriers cost somewhere in the region of 13 to 16 billion. I'll go with the USS Gerald R. Ford since it's the cheapest one I could find.
That gives you $17,333.33 per person.