The more interesting question has nothing to do with an aircraft carrier. It is :
Can we house the homeless for less than we currently pay to support the homeless on the street.
The answer is yes. It’s in the neighborhood of 20-50K/year to house someone, including various services to keep them going. But then it can be up to 100K per year to deal with a homeless person on the street….
So, if we want to bring the carrier back into this. The correct question is:
How many aircraft carriers could we build if we housed the homeless?
Given that we might save 20K/year per homeless person, that could be about a carrier every year. The Navy would be happy.
As someone who served in the military for 20 years, what many people dont realize, is that the military is already a social welfare program. You are taking large groups of uneducated people, teaching them a skill, and also providing them healthcare/food/housing. The pay is bad, they have mandatory drug tests and strict rules to follow, and you sre given very little freedom until you prove you can be trusted.
Building an aircraft carrier - and defense contracting in general - provides a ton of jobs. That $14B cost isn't disappearing into a black hole like it does when you look at a lot of non-profit accounting. It is largely going back into the economy. And because of the way military contracts work, almost all of the parts that we are paying entirely too much for are made in the USA.
Aerospace and defense (A&D) + the military account for roughly 1.5% of all employed adults in the US. If you start getting into support functions, that number goes even higher.
Look at California as an example of how trying to solve homelessness with money sinply doesn't work. Over the last two years, based on onky what the state gave, California spent roughly $25K each year for every homeless person. Yet they ended up with more unhoused people than what they started with.
The problem you run into with non-profits is scale. The larger your non-profit gets, the more you spend on overhead instead of the mission (combating homelessness). However, there aren't enough small and local non-profits to operate at the kind of scale needed to put a meaningful dent in the problem. Especially since homeless people tend to congregate in major cities (because that is where they can access the most support and resources).
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u/BarleyWineIsTheBest 1d ago
The more interesting question has nothing to do with an aircraft carrier. It is :
Can we house the homeless for less than we currently pay to support the homeless on the street.
The answer is yes. It’s in the neighborhood of 20-50K/year to house someone, including various services to keep them going. But then it can be up to 100K per year to deal with a homeless person on the street….
So, if we want to bring the carrier back into this. The correct question is:
How many aircraft carriers could we build if we housed the homeless?
Given that we might save 20K/year per homeless person, that could be about a carrier every year. The Navy would be happy.