It shouldn’t be either/or. This is humanitarian plus straightening out our back yard, which will also save us in the long run.
No reason we can’t do both. And Trump of course has been working hard on straightening out the healthcare side. We have lots of options for the homeless that some homeless vets are passing up on. (And we need an equal standard of care for the non-vet homeless, too.) There are limits as to what we can do there other than enforce laws against vagrancy, etc.
” There are limits as to what we can do there other than enforce laws against vagrancy, etc.”
I am just outside Tallahassee which has a homeless shelter that has been the source of many, sometimes most, of the day’s arrests. Having witnessed some of this, as you can’t miss them, they are on every street in my side of town, I can attest to some of the problems. Many display obvious signs of being drunk or high. A large percentage are young to early middle age. Some of the cardboard signs read something like, “Homeless Vet.”
A friend living in an apartment in a formerly safe neighborhood near TCC campus, and close to the new shelter, walked out his door to discover the black shop owner sharing his parking lot had been stabbed to death by a homeless black. The attacker was normally a panhandler living in the homeless shelter. My friend will be moving when his lease is up as he has a couple of his kids living with him and the neighborhood is now too dangerous for them.
(Thank you city planners who moved the shelter from downtown where businesses complained to adjacent to a college campus and housing; where people don’t vote.)
Whatever the problems are that the homeless are subject to, they aren’t the kind that would be resolved by just finding them a home and giving them food. That would be easy. Addition and mental issues are hard to resolve. And like the old joke, how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? One. But the lightbulb has to want to change.