No mystery here...

"We can end homelessness in British Columbia, with measurable benefit to our public health and collective dignity, for less money that we are currently spending to maintain the homeless."

As I've said a number of times before here I believe, there is no mystery to the root cause of poverty and homelessness in society, certainly all previously and existing class societies, from the time of slavery to capitalism. When too much is "skimmed of the top" of the socially produced product pile by the ruling class, that controls the economy and its product, less is available to provide the bottom class orders a decent/livable standard of living. (It's described as "profit", and executive bonuses and CEO salaries and bonuses etc.)

It really is that goddamn simple, even though this theft of a grossly distorted and arbitrarily decided share by the capitalist ruling class occurs behind the cover of the workings of the so-called "free market". Which it ain't.

Check out the profit and income figures of the top 1% of society, and compare that to the share that is made available to the bottom masses.It is obvious enough, though the ruling strata attempt, of course, to obscure and hide their theft of share.

As I also say, the working class and its impoverished stratas are about to get the political and economic education of their lives, during this extremist right wing, serving the ruling class period.

The answer is democracy; especially "economic democracy".

Not so sure

that it is that goddman simple.

What are we going to do about the fact that a lot of our indistrial goods come from places where people are not only willing to put up with incredible density and a simple storage level of living, as well as bare subsistence level of nuttrition? There is nothing to protect our work force from being 'outcompeted' or at least have their pay rates pushed down by people living in bunks in metro-china, 40 to an partment, and barely eating enough to keep alive. How do you propose to 'compete' with the prices their bosses can pare down to for pot scrubbers and shoes and clotheshangers and flower vases, etc., etc., etc.? How do you get people in this country, who make enough for a lower middle class life style, but can edge up to the appearance of maybe higher middle class, if they cram two salaries and abdicate responsibility for their children and then buy the stuff nobody ever sees from Walmart - how do you get those people to see that they should buy Canadian, that they should act to protect our standard of living as a whole, our culture, and our integrity? I don't see it, but I would certainly think it would contribute to a better match between affordability of what we need and how much money people have between them. Instead, we have opened the floodgates for cheap stuff and everyone is jubilant. We are sawing right through the bough we are sitting on, and we will fall and hurt ourselves. But everyone thinks it won't be they who get the bruises, and so nobody cares.

War is not needed.

Like it or not we have to try to get everybody's living standard up to a reasonable level, or we will all loose.
It is time to stop the NIMBY attitude and go for world wide political action.
We need to stop getting so excited about small differences here and realize that the money people operate on a worldwide scale!
We have to counteract that!
National political parties will have to associate with similar parties all over the world!
Yes, we will suffer reduced wages, but if we act soon we may just manage to still have a job in fifty years.
Too bad so few people can see the writing on the wall, or study who buys up all our rescource companies?
There will not be a third world war, because "they" are winning by taking over the economic structure of the western world.

Homelessness is a lower level of Poverty.

Homelessness is very simple to understand and even more simple to reverse.
Here it is, POVERTY NEVER KEPT UP WITH INFLATION. Minimum wage has also fallen behind inflation, this was done on purpose. It will take a 100% raise in welfare and minimum wage rates, to end homelessness. Side effects will be the base of our economy will have purchasing power, and business people will be dragged kicking and screaming all the way to the Banks with truckloads of cash. It’s a horrible thought. Homelessness will end within 6 months.
Keeping up with Communist China’s pay rates will not happen without our economy and governments collapsing. Wages in China may be $5 per day, but corn is 9 cents a dozen, Medical and Dental are free, I’ve never heard of a homeless Chinese person. Hello they are Communist, we’ll never compete on an equal playing field. China’s game plan for the next 25 years is to continue ending poverty. What is Harper and Campbell’s plan for our society?

It's not them, it's us. Or, we're them. Whatever.

“Wages in China may be $5 per day, but corn is 9 cents a dozen, Medical and Dental are free, I’ve never heard of a homeless Chinese person. Hello they are Communist..”

Yeah, and we are freedom-loving people with a constitution to protect our rights. Yet we can now be pulled out of the daily traffic and ‘talked to’ by Vancouver’s finest, if we are ‘known activists’ with a possible anti-Olympic bend of mind. Do you perhaps suppose we aren’t told the full truth of everything that’s daily reality for the common Chinese? In any case, they seem to be running in all directions to live elsewhere on the globe, so maybe they’re exporting their potential homelessness, and maybe there are reasons for all these violent incidents that are popping up all over the place, not just in Xinjiang, and maybe the moon is made of green cheese…

But it’s an interesting set of numbers there. So corn really shouldn’t be costing more than 9 cents a dozen? So either profit for middle men really has taken a whopping parasitic turn in our economy, or there is something completely wrong with the exchange rate, it does not reflect actual purchasing power…

I would like to know for what reason minimum wages have not kept up with inflation as a deliberate measure? I would think it was just because we kept importing cheap labor from elsewhere, when our own bottom rung, such as our children with no job experience or trade, would start getting assertive and actually ask for a decent pay rate. I would also like to know how we would now pay for the 100% increases you suggest. Not just that ‘some of us have plenty’, or ‘take it from the rich’, but a real practical specific plan of exactly what kind of funding we should commandeer to achieve this…

And as far as the impossibility of competing with those countries with lower pay rate and prices: We are doing it now, and the result is poverty and homelessness. We would have everyone and more employed here, if we didn’t have our banks and other enterprises contract out their call services to India or Gods know where, and if we all were willing to pay for can-openers made in Canada….

Why are we going far afield and trying to evoke Internationale, when all we need to do is pay the guy next door twenty bucks instead of the trader selling goods from Indonesia six bucks? Because it’s so much easier and cheaper to gab, and to place the responsibility elsewhere, and it won’t hurt our own personal pocketbook so directly and immediately? I think we need to walk the walk.

More about Humpty-Dumpty...

At a "controlling the working population" level, as ruling class serving governments work monetary and interest rate policy to maintain a certain and deliberate level of unemployment, as a brake on working class wages and other standard of living expectations, some level of tolerated poverty likewise serves to maintain a "controlling level of fear" in the working class population. It keeps those one pay cheque or slightly better away from poverty, with their noses to the grindstone, behaving, and doing as they are told for fear they too may join the ranks of the completely dispossessed.

And I understand there is a level of both unemployment and poverty at which the ruling class must even understand that it works against their "managing the population" interests. (For even working people will tolerate some level of unemployment and poverty, and include it in their existential equation.) But at too high of levels, maintained for too long, as we are now approaching, it also provokes a restive, even rebellious response.

But allowing the growth of even some level of unemployment and poverty, like dragging down the incomes of the working class, who is also the majority "consumer" of products in the marketplace, is not unlike knocking old Humpty-Dumpty off the wall at some point. It is a whole lot easier to knock him off the wall, than it is to put him back together again and reset him upon his "working consumer" place on the wall again.

(The traditional means for doing that has been engaging in a major war somewhere, which puts masses of people back to work and with money in their pockets. And of course, the war itself becomes a major consumer, in the re-stimulation of the capitalist market cycle.)

And that is fundamentally the force at work now within capitalist economies, undermining their recoverability. Unemployment, poverty and declining working class incomes/purchasing power sets in motion a snowballing effect, that once it is set rolling down the hill, gathers increasing mass and momentum, and the growing unlikeliness that it can be stopped, short of the very bottom of the hill.

dorothy why not Dorothy?

Dorothy no one has all the answers, but a group of us may answer many questions, and whatever we say is ignored by the people that lead us all! The propaganda we are fed from birth leads us to believe that Canada is a Utopia, I have a doubt, can I say that?
Doubling welfare rates will end homelessness. A single person on welfare gets $610 per month or $7,320 per year, and a homeless person costs society $55,000 per year. A shelter mat on the floor costs $2,700 per month or $32,400 per year. Dorothy what do we do? Double welfare rates to $14,640 or pay $55,000 per person to keep a growing number of people homeless? The days of saying go find jobs are over. To me its cheaper to let people afford housing. We already give rent subsidizes to the working poor. Canada spends about 1% of GDP on poverty, that’s less than the U.S.A. many European countries spend 4.5% of their GDP on poverty, if Canada were to doubled what we spend on eliminating poverty, we would still be paying less than half of what other countries spend, interesting, so why don’t we end poverty?
Minimum wage could be doubled. We bring in farm workers and it’s the law to pay them something over $9.00 per hour, yet a BC citizen starts at $6.00 per hour. I’ve never heard of a government worker being paid minimum wage, have you? Even Gordon Campbell states the average wage, paid in BC is about $20 per hour. So is doubling the minimum wage going to cause the sky to fall?
We could solve the homeless problem if we wished to. About 3 years ago a vote was taken in Ottawa to end poverty with that $60 billion dollar surplus, Harper did not even blink, the answer was no! A few months later the surplus was transferred to the rich and this year Canada is in a deficit in the multi billions of dollars.
With my eyes wide open I now know the Propaganda I’ve been fed all my life is crap. Just the Oil and Gas sales in this country could have ended poverty, but Canada pumps neither Oil nor Gas. Why is it Saudi Arabia and many other oil producing countries charge about 20 cents per gallon to their citizens and Canadians pay over $5.00 per gallon, Oh Well. End of this pointless rant.

I am not economist..

I am not economist, but it does not mean that i do not know something about economy. As I observe the state of economy, i can understand the simple plain word which is affordability..It is a common sense that the economy of a nation is supported by domestic spending of average consumers. It is equally clear that growth of the house market can not be sustained without synchronized growth in household incomes. When the growth in household incomes under pace that of the house market, the affordability becomes an issue. With the gap between two growth rates trending wider, affordability problem is inevitably escalated and will result in a collapse of the house market eventually. Sometimes as an economy obsevant, i would rather have get cash advance to give my family good sustainance.Read more at http://personalmoneystore.com/Cash-Advance/

Images of deviance and social control

Some very good points above. Poverty is being created in order to isolate a subclass of such misery that others will comply with the transformation of Democracy into Mexican style pseudo-feudalism, out of sheer terror at the possibility of falling into it.

This subclass can be redefined in any way the owners of mass media outlets wish, as deviant, anti-social, criminal or even terrorist. Thus justifying oppression, disappearances and political/military alliances for the usual purposes.

Rule of Law is being systematically replaced by Biggest Asshole Wins. Or, to put it another way, whoever controls the police and the television news gets whatever he wants.

When fear controls the masses, whoever can carry out the worst horror becomes master, until guillotines go back into mass production.

Coyoteman's point about the structure of recovery is very pertinent to avoiding all this unhappiness.

The traditional means is a big expensive war. Maznufactured goods can be built and then blown up someplace so they have to be rebuilt, ad nauseum. Creating much employment without any chance of oversupply.

But we have a war that needs fighting. One that will be very expensive, will require huge funding, retooling of whole industries, massive numbers of workers. One that will inspire such passion in the masses that they will not feel the need to execute the owners, will even inspire such patriotic fervour that the cynical owners themselves might be transformed and converted.

I'm talking about the war against the ending of civilisation. Our entire infrastructure desperately needs redesigning and rebuilding. Ways must be found to power everything without releasing carbon. Ways must be found to remove huge amounts of carbon already released.

This noble purpose could be a way to reenergize humanity, and bond us into a common purpose in every nation and every language. And done well, would also require the labours of every human to accomplish. Ending poverty, maybe forever.

Better than any ten "New Deals", and that example proves that this is a possible appraoch. The war is not necessary, and can be avoided by converting arms manufacturing capacity into the means to create all this new technology.

It will need a charismatic message, and some inspiring people to deliver it.

But I really think it is the only other way.

ethics

It isn't about whether or not homelessness costs more than housing mentally ill people. IT IS ABOUT DOING THE RIGHT THING AND CHOOSING AND ETHICAL SOCIETY OVER A GREEDY ONE. It is about taking care of each other and not setting the elderly and sick and insane adrift on ice floes when they no longer contribute. It is about caring for the public good and saying no to selfish consumerism, once and for all, and by doing so also supporting the working conditions of the repressed poor all over the world currently making the cheap goods we are addicted to and yet don't need at all. Not at all. We need self respect and that comes from taking care of each other with decency and not managerial bullshit and logic.

Homelessness-NeoCon tool

Homelessness is used by the Campbellites and corporate types as a reminder to those pay cheque to paycheque (most of us) people; that they better remain sheeple or they will be on the street next!

Its so obvious that we could and should house everyone because its cheaper; and we all know how much money Premier Gordo needs to save right now in order to balance the books!