> First, we should expect ordinary people to donate more to politics.
My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door. They hounded her for more donations. She got mailings, phone calls, multiple people at her door. She vowed never to give them another cent.
Perhaps an unusually bad experience, but generally you do get punished this way for donating. I emptied my grandmother's mailbox when she became ill, and due to her charitable giving, it was absolutely crammed with political and charity mailings.
I like to give to charities, but I've built up a couple of rules:
- I won't give you a credit card number, because I've seen too many dark patterns about canceling recurring donations. It stinks for online giving because Paypal is awful, but it's basically the only way I can guarantee that I won't need to make phone calls if my giving habits change.
- You always get a unique email address that I can cancel or sort, no matter who you are. Fastmail thankfully makes this very easy.
- Unless I really trust you not to mail me, I won't give you my real address.
Patreon, for all of its problems, has the right idea here. Donors control their subscriptions, and their addresses/emails aren't shared by default. I'd love a similar service for more conventional giving.
> You always get a unique email address that I can cancel or sort, no matter who you are. Fastmail thankfully makes this very easy
Is that possible with Fastmail without having your own domain? I've been looking for a mail provider where you can create unlimited mail addresses to prevent me from being tracked across services for some time now. The problem with using your own domain (slack@yourdomain.tld medium@yourdomain.tld etc) is that only laziness of not implementing automatic domain matching is keeping my identities separate.
If anybody knows of a mail provider who provides that (even with random mailbox names like vtegbssfvi@mailprovider.tld) I would be grateful if you could let me know.
Yes. Aliases are one of the best features Fastmail has, and they work exactly how you're describing -- you just pick a word and you have that email address. (`contact_walmart@fastmail.com`, or `specific_charity_receipt@fastmail.com`, or whatever) If you're done with an email address but you don't want to delete it, you can also disable aliases without giving them up, so email will bounce, but you still technically own it and nobody else will be able to register it.
They're not literally unlimited, but the limit is high enough that in practice, you can have a separate email address for every service that you use.
I do have my own domain, but I don't typically use it for most 3rd-party services. The reason I like aliases more is because if I use the gmail trick or my own domain, there's still a unique piece of information that's tied to my name. In other words, it's still identifying.
Most spammers know to strip the pluses from gmail accounts, so you're not really doing anything at all by adding those. And even if a spammer can't guess your other email addresses, they still know who you are. I'm not particularly secretive about my identity online -- I use my real name as my handle. So it's not even always about blocking spam -- sometimes you want to use an email without giving a company a very obvious link to who you are.
The problem is that most spammers know how to strip the plus tags, or can strip the dots to associate you across multiple accounts.
I think of throwaway addresses the same way as I think of a VPN. I shouldn't be the only person on the domain I'm using, and there shouldn't be any persistent information in the address.
With Fastmail, the only information I have to give up is that it is a Fastmail account. I can have `<some_random_string>@fastmail.com`, which makes it much harder for an advertiser or spammer to link my identity from that email to another one.
I donate to multiple charities through Givewell, and I allow them to release my contact info, which means the charities know who I am. But I believe they have an option to hide your contact info so that you're donating anonymously to the charities. So in that case, only Givewell will have your contact info.
I had the same problem. I got follow on requests flooding, then overwhelming me to the point of frustration and then annoyance.
Much later I listened to a podcast or ted talk of someone who talked about charity. I believe she worked with nonprofits as her day job.
I was listening to her expecting to understand altruism, to find out how and why people donate money, and how they find worthy causes along with decent organizations to donate to.
The one thing that stuck with me was when she asserted that the number one reason people will donate to your charity is: Have they donated before.
This gave me an unexpected glimpse behind the curtain at what motivates organizations to over-contact their previous benefactors.
It made me a little sad too, reminding me a little of the petting zoo. You take a young kid to the petting zoo to interact with the animals. But then they see this tiny child has a handful of food, and you are surrounded by crazy goats that chase the helpless youngster until she throws the food and runs away.
Nearly every time I've donated to something political, it's come to bite me in the ass. Donate to a candidate? They sell/give my info to related PACs and groups (and there's no stopping it, because it's considered political speech to solicit for donations). Last time I gave money to one of the fundraisers with vests that hang around downtown, my credit card got charged at an eastern European online retailer.
I feel the only real way to avoid this is to donate through an anonymous vehicle, but I believe anonymous political donation vehicles and everything that came with the Citizens United decision to be at the core of the rot in our system.
I wonder if there is a service that could handle the donation and subsequent trashing of incoming correspondence for you. Although, I also wonder about giving money to annoying people.
The core of the rot is not anonymous donations. At the end of the day, nobody actually cares that Candidate X is receiving money from Puppykillers Inc.
The problem is that Candidate X owes her success to donated money. She is now beholden to her donors, not her constituents. Democracy, for sale by the dollar isn't democracy, it's a slide into oligarchy.
The only solution to this problem is public-only funding of campaigns.
> The only solution to this problem is public-only funding of campaigns.
I fail to see how that addresses any of the issues we have "earned media" from the cable "news" propaganda (I'm not using that word lightly here) networks or the "Citizen's United" style documentary production which would not likely be curtailed by the change you propose. All you do is shift the money from being thrown at the 16 minutes per hour of advertisement blocks to the 44 minutes per hour where we don't notice we are being advertised to.
At that point you have just placed a limit on spending which is what some other countries do anyway. Personally I think we should move towards banning the use of any paid for media in politics. If candidates want to reach voters they should do it in person or using social media. And voters should be able to ignore some candidates and listen to others based on who they follow. And candidates should need to succeed without the normal public sphere rather than the weaponised media landscape.
As counterpoint: I've donated to the Great Slate [1], a panel of Democrat long-shots in historically underserved areas. (I'd heard of them in large part thanks to Maciej/idlewords [2])
I've gotten emails, sure, but they respect unsubscribe. From that experience, I'm comfortable donating again through ActBlue [3], the donation platform they used.
Yeah the Bernie campaign sends me what seems like 10 texts per week since I donated, I honestly don’t understand it because it must really fatigue most people. Maybe it optimized donations over some small A/B test but I will absolutely find a way to get off this mailing list ASAP if it continues. Every single ask for more money has some seemingly urgent reason for it but you can’t use that repeatedly over long durations! It reminds me of the story someone once posted here where every task was a P0 for the PM and eventually they started calling things P-1, P-2, etc
Even once a week sounds like a lot but averaging more than one per day is just ridiculous.
I was taken off the sms list “effective immediately” because they asked if I was ready to Feel the Bern and I responded with a gif of Hulk Hogan in front of a giant American flag saying “Hell yeah brother!”
I was just trying to be a patriotic millennial but it got me off the sms list so silver lining I guess. Now I donate whenever I have the spare cash and I don’t have to worry about them blowing up my phone.
The Yang campaign has emailed but is extremely polite. I don't live in the US but since being on the mailing list, the donation solicitations were respectful and only moderately frequent. I still unsubscribed.
I think this pattern really caught fire when Obama heavily employed it in 2008. That campaign bombarded your inbox for donations.
To state the obvious, Bernie raises 10x what Tulsi does[1]. It's probably partly in how the campaign harvests new pledges from prior pledgers (even if it's aggressive).
I'm under no allusions that she has the same name recognition that he has.
It may be a chicken and egg problem but I think in this case the low donations came before the hounding. Political entities hound donors because people do not donate enough, so they have to try too hard to get the funds they need. If they stopped doing that tomorrow and announcing it so everyone knows and acts upon this new information, I expect total donations to go down significantly, not up. Perhaps I am wrong, but I think no entity puts more effort into a goal than necessary. If it were possible to get more donations by doing less, it would have been done already.
Literally as much as the Koch family and other, competing interests for political donations. “Enough“ is going to vary by charity or company though. I fear animal shelters literally never have enough as there are just so many homeless domesticated animals.
> I fear animal shelters literally never have enough as there are just so many homeless domesticated animals.
That problem could be solved far more easily if all Americans were more responsible with researching what it takes to safely raise a pet and what responsibilities you have if you think you can't.
Similarly, if American voters were far more responsible with how often they voted, researching their {candidates/parties/platforms/issues}, and what they let their representatives do in their name, lots of these political issues would cease to exist (without a giant increase in spending or refactor in how campaigns can spend).
For an interview take-home I was asked to slice and dice a voter donation database to find analytics ranging from simple top lists to counts/lists of people who were most likely to donate again (following a given formula). Many of those potential recurring donors were people like this, who had given once and whose other (publicly available) political metrics indicated they were a strong match for donating again if matched.
I'm registered independent, but donated to my first political candidate (ever) recently, and experienced this same hounding, to the point that I ended up blocking/banning/giving fake info just to keep them off my notification screen every day.
I figure these people dont even bother filtering like the work I did above, as I had never once received solicitation for donation before. Now I'm bracing for the inevitable deluge of similar hounding from other candidates in coming years.
I dont give my real address, i use email labels for filtering and have leaf accounts in a forwarding network of emails specifically for crap like this.
I can only wonder how its going to work if the current political campaign "best practices" alienate a large slice of voters just because the current most-active slice is susceptible to that kind of manipulation.
A previous employer decided to get 100% of employees donating to United Way. They hounded everyone and even gave bonus checks to top executives who otherwise refused to donate. Just to tick the box I donated the absolute minimum which I think was fifty cents a paycheck. I figured their administrative overhead was high enough that was a net loss or nearly so.
Same experience for me, but mine was for donating blood, not money to politics. After a few years of repeatedly saying no they finally backed off and left me alone, but I haven’t donated since. I don’t want to be hunted down like that. It’s a shame, really. If I could donate and be guaranteed to never be contacted I totally would.
I donated to the ACLU a couple of years ago. They’ve since spent the entire amount mailing me solicitations for more. Their latest one was this really obnoxious envelope with FINAL NOTICE written on it. I like their mission but fuck everything about their solicitation techniques.
I like to use tracer email addresses. I gave them aclu@mydomain.com and it’s easy to see when they sell my email address as I’ve only ever used that email address with them.
When I’m bored one day I’ll try to do a genealogy of how these addresses spread from sale to sale. But I don’t think I keep enough spam to get a cool picture.
Likewise, bad experiences with the ACLU. ... including fundraising messages that I found offensive (and obviously entirely off message for what I understood the ACLU to stand for).
Perhaps things are different in Canada, but I've donated both to political parties and to multiple charities for various causes, and I've never been 'hounded' as I would describe it. I've received mail, but any time I've asked to be removed from their mailing list, that's the end.
Many years ago when I thought this was funny, I had a friend who would donate $10 in cash to Focus on the Family, Southern Poverty Law Center, DNC, RNC. For $40 they would get a deluge of mailers, calls, even visits. My friend feels bad to this day because the spam continues 30 years later.
I had this done to me many addresses ago and it’s bizarre how many mailers say something like “donate now so we can raise more donations because of terrible thing C”
I think the issue not covered in the nice article is that it’s not just coordination it’s competence. I think the reason why smart people don’t donate is that there’s not something to buy. If you have almond industry level funds to a cause it would like just result in a bunch of marathons and commercials. Smaller amounts, well placed seem much more effective.
"My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door"
I don't get why this is normalised. If fraudsters aren't doing this I'd be amazed. How hard is it to mock up an ID badge, get a clip board and start taking 'donations'.
The same for alumni donations for my former university. Donate even a small amount once and they'll ramp up future requests by an order of magnitude (a Global 50 university, Top 10 by some rankings, not short of cash).
Yeah. I feel like my modest one-time donations to Oxfam and cancer foundations have already been matched by all the mail they've sent me over the years since. Makes me less likely to donate again.
I guess you did nothing about it, so they will continue.
I donated once to a charity via a text message, they phoned me back (told me it was a thank you call but obviously they wanted more), I told them never to call me again. That worked.
I'm on oxfam's list, I just asked them in-store to never send me any more crud, they got that put on the system, never got anything more again.
If there is a problem, fix it, don't hope it goes away.
I don't think that's unusually bad. I'm especially annoyed once they seem to have spent more than I gave them just on postage to me. I don't understand it.
i'm not sure if gmail is evil but it does filter most of these to a secondary inbox for me. such little gratitudes add up to me staying on the platform.
The other sad thing about charities is they take so much money in overhead. Plus the wealthy use it as a vehicle for tax avoidance - would you rather pay $500k in taxes or have your brother in law make a Save the Children charity and give it to him? Then the tax is written off and your brother in law gets a salary, plus his charity can spend the rest on socialite parties I mean fundraisers.
Penalizing overhead is actually a huge source of dysfunction at non-profits:
The problem is, those overhead tasks don’t disappear just because you don’t spend money on them. Someone has to monitor the accounts, find new donors, calculate taxes, organize the holiday party. Centralizing these tasks in dedicated departments, hiring specialists, getting good at them, that would have looked like bureaucracy. So instead, we spun them out to the entire staff ... No one had any expertise in writing grant proposals, conducting impact assessments, or managing high-maintenance funders like the European Commission—training courses would have counted as overhead spending.
Overhead is only inefficient if the charity isn't getting results. And charities that have low overhead but still don't get results are by definition still inefficient. Don't worry about overhead, focus on results.
I think we're talking past each other. I'm saying that trying to measure overhead as a way to evaluate charities creates perverse incentives to try to reduce reported overhead, without truly reducing overhead. In order to be effective, charities of course still have to have low true overhead and actually spend money on their work.
Although in principle, if a charity were to spend 80% of its budget on fundraising, but per-dollar donated that charity gets the best results for saving children from dying of malaria or whatever, you really would refuse to donate to it?
Of course not, but the reason we look at these metrics in the first place is because we can't usually say with certainty that Charity A is head-and-shoulders the best charity for saving children from malaria. We're trying to sift through the pile to find the charity that will do the most with our dollar.
Sure, but I'm saying something more specific than just "head-and-shoulders the best". I'm saying we should entirely ignore overhead and in fact pretty much ignore what the charity itself does at all (how much of your donation goes to fundraising? How much goes to lavish hotels?), and just look at the actual malaria rate in the children they treat.
I highly recommend reading the New Republic article I linked to, it talks about all this in a lot more detail.
For me, it’s difficult to determine what overhead is good (reasonable accountant) vs bad (paying their spouse’s consulting firm to do accounting).
So it’s easier for me to just filter by low absolute and relative overhead than try to figure out if they are paying too much for their paper or overpaying for motor pool and stuff like that.
> it’s easier for me to just filter by low absolute and relative overhead
Don't. Don't even do that. Don't try to determine their overhead at all. Just look at results, like the rate of malaria in children in the region.
Better to donate to a charity that stays in lavish hotels, parties all the time, and reduces the malaria rate by 20%, than a charity with no overhead, works super hard, pays their staff little, spends 95% of their budget on treatment, and still only reduces the malaria rate by 5%.
I’d rather donate to a charity that both has low overhead and reduces the malaria rate by 20%.
It’s not a good assumption to think that because a charity pays lavish salaries and stays in fancy hotels that it is somehow more effective.
I know our examples are made up but it’s pretty much impossible to tell if a single charity reduces the malaria rate. It’s pretty difficult in general to determine the impact of charities because unless you’re the Carter Foundation working on Guinea Worm there are lots of other factors and organizations contributing to a shared goal.
It’s not a good assumption to think that because a charity pays lavish salaries and stays in fancy hotels that it is somehow more effective.
You're 100% right!
We should assume no such thing. We should measure whether it's more effective and reward that. Measuring and rewarding anything else creates perverse incentives, such as:
I’d rather donate to a charity that both has low overhead and reduces the malaria rate by 20%.
Really? If two charities deliver the same results, where one pays its staff minimally and spends the vast majority of its money on its treatment program, and the other pays and treats its staff well (lavishly, even) and spends less money on a more cost-effective treatment program, yielding the same ultimate results, then I'd say the former enriches more lives and deserves my money more.
When people say "no good deed goes unpunished", that's a joke because that's obviously not how we want the world to work. The world we want is one where bad deeds are punished and good deeds are rewarded.
We should prefer to donate to a charity that is as effective as alternatives but pays and treats its workers better, because the people who make those missions succeed deserve to be rewarded, not punished.
it’s pretty much impossible to tell if a single charity reduces the malaria rate ... there are lots of other factors and organizations contributing to a shared goal
That's why the article I linked to advocates randomized controlled trials, among other ideas.
>If everyone who cared about homelessness donated $100 to the problem, homelessness would be solved. Nobody does this, because they know that nobody else is going to do it, and their $100 is just going to feel like a tiny drop in the ocean that doesn’t change anything. People know that a single person can’t make a difference, so they don’t want to spend any money, so no money gets spent.
I wonder if something like the National Popular Vote compact could work here.
It works like this: state legislatures pass a law that says if enough states sign onto the compact to pass 270 electoral votes, their electors are automatically assigned to the winner of the popular vote. In this way, nothing changes and no one has to sacrifice anything until enough states agree to actually effect a change, and then they act together to effectively obviate the Electoral College.
Sure, if I donate $100 to a homelessness charity, it'll feel like a drop in the bucket. But if some charity starts an initiative to take my credit card information and only charge it once enough people donate to end homelessness, I might be more inclined to do it. Either the threshold is reached and homelessness ends, or I get a feeling of altruistic pride for doing nothing. Everyone wins!
This is the model some crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter work with: they call it "all-or-nothing funding" [1]. They mention the same benefits, reduced risk for backers if the target amount has not been reached.
Throwing money at social problems doesn't typically fix them.
If you want to make a dent in homelessness, you can start by advocating for more Missing Middle housing in your neck of the woods (anywhere in the US). Our housing supply issues are a huge part of the problem.
This might be more convincing if the link was relevant to your claim, maybe some studies of places that increased housing availability and saw decreased homelessness or something. Instead it seems mostly about transit.
The link isn't really intended to support an argument. It's more intended to explain what Missing Middle housing is about (and walkable neighborhoods is a big part of that).
I have had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy, spent years homeless and got myself off the street. I've studied the problem space a fair bit.
Below are links that support the assertion, if you are interested:
For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes
Research by Zillow Group Inc. last year found that a 5 percent increase in rents in L.A. translates into about 2,000 more homeless people, among the highest correlations in the U.S. The median rent for a one-bedroom in the city was $2,371 in September, up 43 percent from 2010. Similarly, consultant McKinsey & Co. recently concluded that the runup in housing costs was 96 percent correlated with Seattle’s soaring homeless population. Even skeptics have come around to accepting the relationship. “I argued for a long time that the homelessness issue wasn’t due to rents,” says Joel Singer, chief executive officer of the California Association of Realtors. “I can’t argue that anymore.”
The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
>> Throwing money at social problems doesn't typically fix them.
I don't know where you read this because it simply isn't true. It is, however, commonly used by conservatives to argue against funding social programs.
If money alone fixed social problems, white people wouldn't have burned down Black Wall Street. Blacks there had money. It in no way protected them from racism.
That in no way is an argument against social programs per se.
But I would personally much rather see our housing supply issues remedied rather than see more funds earmarked for "the homeless." If you need to be out in the street before you qualify for help, society is doing something very wrong.
Additional funding can help move the numbers -- if you have effective programs. Simply looking to raise funds without effective solutions doesn't do much of anything.
Most programs intended to "help the homeless" suffer from The Shirky Principle:
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Real solutions for this problem space typically address underlying causes, such as affordable housing and access to affordable healthcare, without positioning themselves as homeless programs per se.
Programs explicitly designed to "help the homeless" tend to keep homelessness alive by requiring one to be homeless to qualify for assistance. Real solutions address risk factors for homelessness independent of your current housing situation.
I had a guy once begin enthusiastically talking at me about his vision for taking over the downtown area of the small town I'm in with homeless services. I advised him I was late to a meeting and walked away.
I would like to see the homeless issue in my small town shrink. I have no desire to see the downtown area turn into nothing but homeless services.
There are specific gaps in service here that I would like to see closed. I would like to see a mailing address service for the homeless here.
A mailing address is critical to job hunting or making money online through a service. You need a mailing address to help get your life back.
Most homeless services provide emergency relief, such as free food and free clothing. It's a feed a man a fish approach.
It helps a homeless person survive. It doesn't help them resolve their problems so they can stop being homeless.
You need some emergency services of that sort, but if it is all you have, it only serves to entrench the problem.
Most people talking about "If we could just get x amount of money" don't actually have solutions to offer. I think I do have solutions to offer and money is the least of my worries.
It would take some money. But I'm much more concerned with issues like getting buy-in. A new idea is shockingly hard to sell.
The original quote was "Throwing money at social problems doesn't typically fix them." and it's really not far off of "money alone doesn't fix social problems". The difference is mostly of tenor.
I don't get the impression that everyone who says they want to end homelessness means they want to give the homeless homes for nothing to do so.
Many people just don't want to see it on the streets. It's ruining their view and social standing having such riff-raff on the streets of their expensive world-class cities.
But give them homes? Sure, if they include bars and a keyless lock.
That's the impression I get from many Americans. The whole empathic nuanced understanding of homelessness, substance addiction, and mental illness, is a fairly niche perspective and something I only encountered substantially in the SF bay area. And even then, it was mostly just paying lip service to the popular attitude from what I could tell, few actually did anything about the problem.
How is anyone supposed to do anything? We need the federal and state governments to do something, funding mental health services and facilities. That takes huge amounts of money and politicians don’t gaf because liberal cities are going to vote for Democrats anyway.
The only solutions other than that are status quo or imprisoning the homeless, where the second is much more expensive than the first. I guess in your mind unless I start trying to provide free addiction treatment on the streets I’m just paying lip service?
>That takes huge amounts of money and politicians don’t gaf because liberal cities are going to vote for Democrats anyway.
Politicians gaf about primaries. California did away with theirs, so politicians are forced to gaf about the general. "My opponent is doing nothing about homelessness" is a great message for a primary challenger.
There are other reasons, like gerrymandering, that give incumbents an advantage, but party doesn't guarantee safety. And there are plenty of issues where an alternative isn't possible because of partisan politics, but homelessness certainly isn't one. No one is in favor of it.
It's easy to estimate what it would cost to end homelessness, if the number of people nationally is around 600,000.
The thing that makes it more expensive than you think or people want to admit, is that a cot is not enough. Giving everybody a home is not enough. People who cannot cope with living in someone else's house or having their own apartment are even less likely to cope with owning property. To solve the problem, you have to provide every one of them with a spot in something comparable to an assisted living facility. That costs in the ballpark of $4K per month.
So, $30B per year. How much capital is needed for that income? Median assumed rate of return for public pension funds is 7.25%, let's use that.
The bill, if we're being honest, to solve homelessness, as a lump sum, is therefore about $410 billion.
Sounds like a lot. Well, it's about $3200 per American household. But that's assuming everyone paid equally. Total net worth of the US is said to be about $123 trillion, so $410 billion would be around three tenths of a percent of all the country's wealth. Not much when you look at it that way.
Your assumption that every single homeless person will need assistance is wrong. Most homeless people are fine, they just need help getting back into society in a normal way. There's a metric ton of research on this, but people of privilege seem to think that it takes some kind of enormous negligence to become homeless in the is when it's absolutely not the case, an illness or a divorce will do for most folks.
Of course I am not assuming every single homeless person needs the same amount of assistance. I'm saying, as someone who is privileged to know what severe and persistent mental illness is like, that the average would be around I stated.
The article makes clear that it isn't about a solution for everybody and it sounds like this is a form of assisted living, like I was describing.
I didn't see where the costs are stated, so are you implying that it is vastly less expensive than my estimate?
"When we comb through and we're picking out three people from this list of 86," Austin says, "it does kind of suck to know that we left 83 people on that list that don't have an option"
Just as it has always been, there are people who are privileged to be helped and those who are not:
"Austin notes they need a candidate who is male and "plays semi-nice with others.""
"Denver found that emergency-service costs alone went down 73 percent for people put in Housing First, for a savings of $31,545 per person; detox visits went down 82 percent, for an additional savings of $8,732."
> Just as it has always been, there are people who are privileged to be helped and those who are not.
You're really misreading that portion of the article. It's discussing a particular opening, and how they slot people into them. Overall numbers for the program are available elsewhere in the article:
"By implementing a model known as Housing First, Utah has reduced that number from nearly 2,000 people in 2005, to fewer than 200 now."
Can you provide an alternative estimate of the (net) cost, and break down the reasons why it differs from mine? And I mean, not precisely at all of course, but in a logical manner. One significant figure seems appropriate.
As far as how many people are helped, or what percentage, maybe Utah has eliminated homelessness. That was an article from 2015; a follow-up might be informative.
In general, I'm really skeptical of solutions to difficult problems described by journalists, because I expect the key is always going to be redefining the boundaries of the problem. How much cutting edge research on cancer do you read about, and yet, when it came down to it, someone I knew got Gemzar and Abraxane and blood transfusions, and then she died.
Sure, that's easy: Your napkin math ignores the fact that the homeless already have significant costs, like shelters, ER visits, law enforcement, and the like.
The findings thus far from housing-first policies appear to indicate that subsidizing housing for chronically homeless reduces these costs dramatically; likely because some of them stem simply from being homeless, and others (like PTSD therapy) are easier to coordinate access to when you're not on the streets.
It's like the criticisms of Medicare for All that claim "oh, we'd have to raise taxes by $X" while ignoring the fact that the current system isn't free.
(Also, my reading of the Utah program is that the housing is substantially lower than the $4k/month you cite. Outside of NYC/SF sort of places, a studio apartment can be had for well under $800.)
Personally I’d like to understand how other developed economies solve the many problems underlying the US’s homeless situation. Money alone will not solve mental health issues, addiction, etc.
EDIT: Yes healthcare, but especially for mental health and addiction. Solving these is pretty far beyond simply implementing medicare for all
Housing supply is a factor. I haven't managed to read it, but I think the title says plenty about one of the ways America is different from other countries:
Another significant factor is health care. Most developed countries have better coverage for their people than we do.
We are also the only developed country in the world without a good national maternity leave policy.
We are also very car dependent. In the US, housing is the single biggest expense for most people and their car is their second biggest expense. It's hard to live without a car in the US. I've done it for more than a decade, but I do freelance work. Trying to hold down a normal job without a car is tough in most places in the US because we don't have walkable neighborhoods and we don't have good public transit.
It's much easier to live without a car in many other countries. This helps make life affordable for people with jobs that don't pay that well. They can support themselves because they can get to work without a car, whereas carless Americans have trouble getting a job at all.
One significant factor is free or low-cost healthcare. Medical bankruptcy is the single largest type of bankruptcy in America, even among people with insurance, and bankruptcy can lead to homelessness. Untreated mental illness is also huge, and that's related to availability of care as well. Losing a job and then losing employer-sponsored health insurance is another version: COBRA coverage is very expensive and temporary, so people with chronic or expensive conditions may fall behind on rent etc between the one-two punch of loss of income and loss of insurance.
Why would you use COBRA as long as the ACA is sputtering along?
Also, when people frame untreated mental illness as a financial matter, it seems silly to me. Drugs are generally cheap, and the expensive ones aren't proven to work significantly better. Expensive treatments for mental illness are just a matter of exploiting desperate people because the first-line approaches don't work or are otherwise intolerable.
Sure, you can pay more to social workers and therapists, but I don't take seriously the idea you can talk someone out of mania, psychosis, or addiction.
You can fund basic research, but that's not something that can solve any societal problems tomorrow.
HUD spends most of that $40B on keeping people housed. Most people receiving HUD benefits, directly or indirectly, aren't considered homeless. If they were then your denominator (# of people) would be much larger and therefore expenditures per person significantly lower.
I think this is what Esperanto did in the beginning but I can't find a reference for that at the moment. Ironically, I found this, http://www.pledgebank.com/, which is pretty much what you're asking for.
The writer is very quick to assume Exxon Mobil's own figure for political spending is disingenuously low, but very quick to countenance the idea that the total amount of spend on political influence is publicly available. Maybe more money is being spent nontransparently? For example, it's a common practice in the UK to hire former (or current!) politicians for sinecure positions at greatly inflated salaries. I doubt anyone admits to these quasi-bribes as being political spending.
I'm sure they don't report such things as political spending.
But it also seems hard to me to imagine that adding up to very much. There are what, each year maybe a few hundred politicians who leave office and might be up for such patronage? If all of them get a million dollars, that's a few hundred million dollars a year. The movers and shakers of Washington DC are also... I mean, a lot of them become lobbyists or media people, and while they probably get good deals in doing that, it's hard to argue that a former congressional committee chairperson is going to be a bad lobbyist or whatever.
I think that actually, the people who become movers and shakers in government tend to not have a ton of trouble getting enough money to live solidly upper-class lifestyles, and they have self-selected as people who value having influence more than money.
Don't just count the politicians. While at Lucent, I observed a manager/project management expert who seemed to be permanently between projects. I was told not to ask about him again, since his cousin/brother-in-law (can't remember which at this late date) was a powerful US senator. In retrospect he probably should have stayed with ATT...
With respect to lobbyists, from the lobbying firm's point of view it might be a good deal to pay a former office holder lots of money for doing nothing at all, if he or she did something particularly helpful before stepping through the revolving door. Quid pro quo.
The specific mechanism is quite limited in scope, but others aren't. Offering contracts, loans, or investment to companies owned by politicians allows the transfer of considerably more money, for example.
I'm not staking a claim as to how much this happens or what mechanisms are used, merely pointing out that it isn't clear that the public figure is accurate.
I mean, Netflix effectively tripled Obama's net worth with one deal. I'm not saying it's quid pro quo, but ex-politicians can command quite a lot of money in exchange for their influence.
That Netflix could so casually triple Obama's net worth kind of emphasizes OP's point. (Note that quite aside from being the most recent two-term US president, who is considerably more popular than the current office-holder, Obama was a best-selling author & Nobel Laureate.)
It happens at the state level too. And it is not just politicians but also regulators. Also prosecutors/state attorneys/etc. with connections into the court system are often hired by law firms with that being a big positive attribute in their consideration.
Yeah, there is tons of money spent on politics outside the above the board lobbying industry. If I run a commercial saying to vote for Pedro I’m not going to be counted in these metrics.
I posted something similar on the author’s site, but I wonder if this is just “revealed preference.”
Perhaps people don’t really care nearly as much about the outcome of elections as they say they do.
I think most people suspect the outcome of an election won’t affect their lives nearly as dramatically as people claim, there’s too much inertia in the system.
Also, maybe, just maybe, people are subconsciously more intellectually humble than they let on, and realize that predictions about the impact of policy and elections are notoriously unreliable.
Taking a political position can serve to identify yourself with a certain social group, or as part of your personal identity, or if you are feeling somewhat metaphysical it can indicate the structure of your ethical system.
In all of those cases there is no need to actually spend money to achieve the goal.
If I am an “Apple person” I need to spend $1,000 on a phone to demonstrate this.
But if I’m a Sanders supporter I can do all this signaling by expressing outrage on Facebook and at dinner parties without spending a dime.
If this theory is correct, a political movement that could somehow get people to feel they have to contribute money to be a “real” supporter with associated social status would be drowning in contributions.
> The US almond industry earns $12 billion per year.
How much of that is actually from sales in the US vs. exports? In 2018, California produced 80% of the worldwide almond crop and exported 70% of it. Americans aren't quite as hungry for almonds as the author assumes.
I was curious, so I looked into it - apparently the US exported $4.5 billion worth of almonds 2017, with Spain being the largest consumer ($0.5 B). Also learned that the US imports almost exactly as many pecans as it exports.
Seems like they may have included it based on export percentages.
If I had to guess why there's so little money in politics I'd guess it's because there are more efficient ways to spend the money.
Political contributions right now seem to function mostly as a tax avoidance strategy. These donations are effectively free. A company or wealthy individual can either pay taxes or donate the money to a "non-political" think tank to promote policies they'd like to see.
Convincing someone to influence elections is easy if they'd pay it in taxes anyways. I'm guessing it's difficult to convince someone that their post tax money is most efficiently spent influencing the political system.
One last note, there's also many other types of interactions companies have with the government. There's state level, regulatory bodies, local and county influences. Companies interact highly with the government at the local levels because they're easier to manipulate than the federal government.
> These donations are effectively free. A company or wealthy individual can either pay taxes or donate the money to a "non-political" think tank to promote policies they'd like to see.
That's not how deductions work. A donation costs the donor much more than the tax reduction. All a deduction does is reduce your adjusted gross income, not literally offset the nominal sum you pay in taxes.
Say my top marginal tax bracket is 20%. If I donate $100 then it's costing me precisely $100. If I don't donate then I'm on the hook for $20 ($100 * 20%) in tax. $100 > $20. This presumes the $100 is earned income, and that the donation is in fact tax deductible. If neither of those hold then the relation is $100 > $0.
If you donate appreciated assets, you don’t pay taxes on the appreciation, so in the best case scenario (e.g. you bought bitcoin at a penny) you donate $100, but it is the equivalent of $80 after tax.
Additionally, you get to write that $100 donation off your income. If you’re in the highest tax bracket, that means you’re saving $39 off your tax bill.
You’ve effectively given $100 in exchange for the cost of $41.
You just agreed with your parent post. He said "A donation costs the donor much more than the tax reduction."
In your example, the donation cost the donor $100, which is much more than the tax reduction of $39 + $20.
But on another point, didn't you just double count the tax? You donated $100 of bitcoin, and you write it off your taxes (so not having to pay that $39), but you just counted another $20 somewhere.
But the donor could have spent the Bitcoin on comic books and paid taxes.
So from a personal balance sheet the options are:
Donate $100, reduce taxes by $20. (Net expense $80, cash in pocket $0)
Cash in $100, pay taxes of $20. (Cash in pocket $80)
The donor still gets more cash by not donating. The difference is that they can get more value by donating. In the sense if they donate to a cause they can spend $100 plus the $20 they would pay in taxes for total impact of $120. If they spent it on a taxable cause then they would spend $100 get $80 in impact since they would need to use $20 on taxes.
This is correct. Money becomes slightly leveraged. If your tax rate is 37%, you effectively get spend to $1.37 for every $1 you remove from your taxable income.
There's also estate taxes where you can create a foundation for large estates to avoid the ~16% tax rate. These are often used to fund political goals.
> you effectively get spend to $1.37 for every $1 you remove from your taxable income
But it's still an expenditure, and a bad one at that. Imagine you can spend $1 in the stock market or burn $1.37. Which one would you do? The very point of the article was that if political expenditures actually provided a substantial return we should see orders of magnitude more political expenditures.
Estate tax avoidance is also a little misleading because you're only avoiding the estate tax, not income tax. Any money you move into a tax-exempt foundation would have already been taxed as income. So whether you shift it into your foundation or simply spend it all immediately by donating it to existing tax-exempt entities, what's the difference?
In no situation does donating money either save you money or come out equal to not donating. Donating always costs you money, period. Your original point was that "donations are effectively free", which is categorically wrong.
Not sure about companies, but as an individual, political contributions are NOT tax-deductible.[1]
On a personal note, I like Andrew Yang's approach to wash out special interest groups and lobbyist with "democracy dollars" [2] of $100 for every citizen. Apparently it's been working in Seattle, but would love to hear from any Seattlites on the progress of the program.
Technically, they are not political contributions. They are donations to non-profits like Americans for Prosperity. Legally a non-profit can use 49% of their money to influence elections directly and the other 51% can push individual issues that are very politically charged.
Almost right, Americans for Prosperity are a non-profit, but it's not tax deductible.
That being said I know most church donations are tax deductible and I've read that they lobby. While not all of your proceeds will go to political campaigns, at at least it will be tax deductible.
Better yet, just start your own church super PAC and have it focused solely on politics. Then you get captial efficiency and tax deductions.
It sounds like you're suggesting that every dollar donated to a non-profit entity results in a dollar less of payable taxes -- I'm not aware of a country with a tax/donation trade-off like that, but would be interested to hear about it if you do.
The best deal that I'm aware of is a reduction in your reported taxable income equal to the donation, resulting in a savings of the affected tax bracket rates * the dollars donated per bracket, but even that kind of thing is somewhat limited as far as I'm aware (eg up to x% of income is allowed per year).
I might have just misunderstood you -- either way, curious if you know something about donations I don't or had a different idea in mind!
Isn't this just a way of saying that effective governance in a representative democracy is a public good, and that thus we should expect it to be underproduced?
> Most research (plus the 2016 results) confirms that money has little effect on victory
Maybe money in the form of "contributions", okay. But having money is still the largest predictor for policy direction.
"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence"[0]
One of the ideas that I cherish is radical transparency. It would be better to see exactly what each company wants to donate to and how money is being spent.
You basically do get that, but it's hard to work around indirections. If I'm in company A and I give money to an industry lobbying group X (and so do companies B, C, D, and E), and then industry lobbying group X gives money to super-PAC alpha, and then super-PAC alpha donates to politicians Bob and Fred, then... how does that become digestible to the public? Some amount of "Company A's" money went to Fred, but it's gone through several fungible buckets since then, and you can't necessarily draw a clean link.
Informally, it may (or may not!) be that Fred was told by someone that his continuing to get these kinds of checks was dependent on him doing a specific favor for company A, but probably not everyone who receives some money that was originally sourced at company A did.
TL;DR: It's hard to build consensus out in the open. Consensus requires the ability to apply positive and negative pressure to get followers to agree to things that are in the general interest but aren't in their interests. Radical transparency cuts down on the levers to build that consensus and makes it harder to pass budgets and other necessary laws.
That depends on your definition of sustainable. Most almonds are/were grown using sacramento river, which can provide a self replenishing source of water.
It is more of a water use issue than a sustainability issue.
Was also thinking about the massive issue they have with the large monoculture meaning they can't really support self-sustaining populations of bees.
Of course, it's not just almonds that have this issue, wine regions in my country (NZ) have the exact same problem which they're belatedly trying to fix.
This has seriously got to be the dumbest, most uneducated piece of writing I have ever read. Yes, lets all just throw money at a broken problem, that'll make it better. "Politics" as the author refers to it as, needs the opposite of funding, it needs to be cut off entirely from donors to see who still stands. The US Government, will have a fund where it gives a set number to each candidate for campaigning purposes and that is ALL that can be used. Already own a private jet? Tough shit, cant use it for campaigning! Already a millionaire with lots of millionaire friends? Sorry charlie!
That is the only way we will get back to grass roots form of electing. Simply throwing money at something rarely fixes a problem.
> I don’t want more money in politics. But the same factors that keep money out of politics keep it out of charity too.
And if "throwing money at something rarely fixes a problem" then what is a better way? Relying on volunteers? What are you donating all your time to day after day for no money? How do you think you incentivize people to spend the majority of their waking hours on something you think is important?
I don't think we should necessarily put more money into politics. I know that will only further consolidate power in a given country. But I'm not sure that was the point of the article either. It points out that it _seems_ like the rational thing to do would be for those with money, especially corporations with vast sums of it, to spend more on their candidate of choice. Yet they don't, at least not as much as the author expects, or expects us to expect. I didn't get the feeling it was saying the only way to save things is to throw more money at it, I think it's asking what is the underlying force that's keeping everyone from doing that? If we can figure that out, maybe we can understand some latent properties of the system we're in with regards to the charity parts.
My mother donated once to some Democratic volunteer who came to her door. They hounded her for more donations. She got mailings, phone calls, multiple people at her door. She vowed never to give them another cent.
Perhaps an unusually bad experience, but generally you do get punished this way for donating. I emptied my grandmother's mailbox when she became ill, and due to her charitable giving, it was absolutely crammed with political and charity mailings.