Reminder that the both the Mormon & Catholic “Churches” could feed, house & clothe every single homeless person in the USA indefinitely & it would only cost them a fraction of their net worth.
They had rather sit on their wealth like the Dragon though, regardless of the punishments for that described in their “Bible”.
That’s how you know they don’t really believe in their own bullshit.
Churches need to pay taxes. It’s unacceptable that they’re the only ones who are officially exempt.
They aren’t the only ones, though. The rich find more than enough write-offs.
How do you reckon we make that happen? Any hope, or are they as powerful as billionaires?
I’m far less worried about churches paying sales, property, and income taxes than people making tens of billions of dollars a year.
We’ll get WAY MORE social benefit out of properly taxing the ultra-ultra rich than we will out of the hundreds of thousands of mini-churches who have volunteer receptionists twice a week or even the few hundred mega churches with jet-setting pastors.
Turn your ire on the bigotry and hypocrisy of a church that attempts to profess love and hate at the same time and out of the same mouth to your heart’s content, but when it comes to money, we need to deal with the robber barons. They’re the ones causing the economic problem.
What? Churches are specifically exempt from ALL taxes in the US. I clouding income, property, and all others.
It’s unacceptable that they’re the only ones who are officially exempt.
Kind of seems like the person you’re replying to is well-aware of that, and when they said “Churches need to pay taxes,” they didn’t mean it as “churches are currently legally obligated to pay taxes” but rather “churches paying taxes is something that needs to happen.”
Not quite. Churches are exempt from many taxes, but not all, as a part of the separation of church and state.
Churches do need to pay their share of FICA, Social Security, and other income-related taxes. Clergy are also required to pay income taxes, though they are permitted some tax-exempt benefits, most notably church-provided housing.
That being said, I’d completely agree with removing tax-exempt status from churches that breach the separation of church and state, beginning with those that outright tell their members who to vote for.
Libertarians are always certain religious charities will foot all of the bills though.
Like if humans were perfect and weren’t greedy assholes.
Pretty sure it’s not that simple. They have projects all over the planet, and administrators that need their cut. Also need church renovations so that people feel their church is fancier than their own homes.
Hey I’m all about shoving this down religious zealots throats but can you site some proof so I can do just that lol 😜
A simple Google search.
Literally 3 words.
Oh sorry Im having discussions on a discussion site. I just like talking to people so sorry I talked to people.
Hostility is not fertilizer for good discussion, it’s just slinging shit.
Meanwhile this comment that I’m responding to is hostile to religion in a passive aggressive way…you guys are fucking dumb sometimes I swear.
Feel free to stop posting here any time then. No one will miss it.
No u
There’s an often cited figure that it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness. As best as I can find, that figure is taken from an interview in 2012 with Mark Johnson who was with the dept of housing and urban development at the time, he wasn’t directly quoted in the interview, it wasn’t an official statement from the department, and by his own admission it was a rough estimate, I’m also not clear if that’s a global figure or specifically for the US, though I suspect it’s for just the US.
The wealth of churches can be a bit hard to quantify, between cash, investments, real estate, artwork, etc. across multiple countries and various legal entities, but either organization is worth, at the low end, easily 10s of billions of dollars, and possibly hundreds (I tend to see estimates for the Mormons somewhere between $100-200 billion) and in the case of the Catholic Church, they are almost definitely sitting on some properties and artifacts that could only be valued as “priceless,” if the Pope, hypothetically, decided to sell off the entirety of Vatican City, how would the value even be determined for that?
So if we assume that 20 billion estimate is good, either church could handle it pretty easily.
That figure is over a decade old at this point though and so likely outdated (if it ever was accurate at all, which is questionable at best,) I’m seeing other sources saying that the true price to end homelessness would be at least $300 billion at the low end.
Which, again, may possibly be within either or both church’s ability to pay for out of pocket depending on how they use their assets, but even if it’s not, they could certainly put a very good dent in the problem.
You could also quibble about what it means to end homelessness and the appropriate ways to go about doing so.
So in short, they could maybe do it, but at the very least they could certainly afford to do a lot more than they are.
Reminder that the secular institution with the Democrats leading it can also fix homelessness with even less of a fraction of their net worth.
Atheism to the rescue again.
Oh. Wait.
Probably, especially these days, but the #GOP has to actually be come a minority party before that can happen.
There have been many spans of time when Democrats had enough control of government to push through what they profress. They don’t use those opportunities.
Not arguing that the two parties are the same. They are better than the Republicans by far, but the Democrats are still not our friends. They either need to be destroyed or changed.
Since Eugene McCarthy, to the Rainbow Coalition, and then the campaigns of Kuccinch and then Bernie working inside has not worked. Of course, neither has working outside.
It’s not about faith. It’s about corporations. Religious, commercial or government, none of them are working for us.
His comment was about faith though.
I keep having to read the dumb narrative that le atheism would fix everything here on Lemmy and everything is the fault of religion but the atheist institutions are doing just as little if not less than the religious ones.
You’re telling me that the satanic temple is not doing as much as religious institutions?
Atheist institutions? You’re trying to compare FAANG to open source. False equivalency. U dumb.
proof again that the government could severely curtail homelessness if they wanted to-- they just don’t.
Proof that the military needs more money, you say? That’s correct!! 😅
How else are they going to keep all those homeless people in check
Or accurately place a missle within 5 meters of Amhed and his little sister as they walk home from school.
No Democrats or Republicans actually get voted out for voting for shitty things, so where’s the motivation?
What did you do the last four years that should make us vote for you again Biden?
“I’m not Trump”
Democrat voters cream their pants and run to the voting booth so Genocide Joe can have another 4 years
Well considering Trump ( by his own words) literally wants to become a dictator and destroy any democracy in this country.
I mean unless someone wants to live in the second coming of Nazi Germany… But hey they’ll have “shown those libs!” when being drug off to camps.
I gotta keep voting for the people I don’t want to vote for else I won’t be able to vote anymore!
This but unironically
The Build Back Better plan is basically a progressive wish list. Biden has done some great things that make him worth voting for.
proof again that the
governmentpeople could severely curtail homelessness if they wanted to-- they just don’t.That’s why we formed a government, to handle shit like this. A government of the people by the people for the people. it’s their fucking job.
44% of single family homes were purchased by private equity in 2023. Some analysts expect institutional investors to control 40% of the SFH rental market by 2030.
And when are the American people going to demand an end to this shit? They represented less than 3% of sfh ownership in 2012. How long until everyone must rent? How long until people are forced to sell due to taxes driving them out of ownership due to inflated pricing from these ghouls?
While I’m not 100% about it, Prop 13 in California has some good effects.
People shouldn’t be tax hiked out of their living quarters. I think most states should have something similar and limit it to only the property you reside in so that property taxes are predictable instead of the incalculable beast they are today in most areas.
Let us not forget apartments, which are invariably occupied by less wealthy folk on average, who definitely can’t afford the cost.
It’s okay guys. The government is (checks notes) giving money to your land lords with no strings attached.
I’ll be at the bar if anyone wants to join me.
Something needs to be done. Housing is a nightmare.
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I don’t think that’s what is happening at all. We don’t need to imagine some vast and ridiculously improbable media conspiracy to explain this seeming disconnect. What I imagine is really happening is that the tools that economists and by extension the media use to gauge the health of the economy are no longer (if they ever were) calibrated to accurately reflect the lived experience of many/most Americans.
This is by far the simplest explanation.
The idea that this is somehow a conspiracy is simply an example of poor media literacy. It doesn’t work like that at all.
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It’s cute that you appear to imagine that anyone gets rich through journalism. No one goes into journalism because they want to get rich.
Journalism is probably the lowest paid “profession” there is because it’s highly competitive and in recent decades the bottom has entirely fallen out of local news organizations due to the Internet having destroyed their revenue streams.
Overwhelmingly people go into journalism because they want to make a difference, not because they want to get rich. If you want to get rich you go into finance or a STEM field or go to law school.
This idea of yours, that journalists use their own economic conditions when reporting on the economy is also objectively absurd.
To the contrary, they report what the economists and financial market experts are saying. Again, this “gaslighting” notion of yours makes no sense inasmuch as it implies something very like a conspiracy or a collective understanding that the truth is to be misrepresented.
This makes no sense in the reality that is competitive reporting in which one is rewarded for reporting “scoops” in terms of breaking news. Again, it just shows how illiterate you and many others are when it comes to understanding what actually happens in newsrooms.
While it makes sense to imagine that traditional economic indicators aren’t necessarily indicative of the lived experience of average citizens, it makes zero sense to imagine that the highly competitive news media is somehow in collusion to present an inaccurate picture of the economy.
That’s just plain stupid.
Source; I have a degree in journalism together with decades in the news business. It’s actually pretty difficult for me to emphasize how wrong-headed you are on this.
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But unemployment is at the lowest ever! We added 200.000 jobs. There was only a soft recession. Line goes up, and just in time for something important. What a coincidence. The economy is so great and we’re back in the bull market!
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And I need 199,999 of them to pay my rent.
See, the real problem is that people don’t know how good they have it.
Sarcasm or not? Hard to tell
In my case, sarcasm, but unfortunately too many articles are stating this without any sarcasm.
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Few seem to care…including those who will one day be there themselves.
Few seem to care…including those who will one day be there themselves.
What are those of us who care supposed to be doing?
Amidst deciding which bills get paid each paycheck, trying to find nutritional variety out of food banks (canned fish intake should ideally be less than 10 cans a month per person, for example, and even rinsing canned vegetables/beans isn’t doing wonders for sodium intake compared to fresh), trying to decide which medical and dental issues we can afford to address and which just get to be endured, and watching debt go to collections because food, insurance, automobile fuel, home energy, rent, and everything related to cars has gone up, what are we supposed to be doing?
In what way can we unite as a people and fix this?
I could not comment as I do not know you, but many people choose nice things like bigger cars, new phone, alcohol and such over quality food. Some however are in a place that they are trapped and have no choice and for those people I have no advice other than to really make some noise and vote accordingly if you are in a country you can.
Worker and renters unions are a good place to start. Talk to your neighbors and coworkers. Join the IWW if you’d like some help
Rents soar as government continues heavy suppression of new housing construction.
I keep seeing this argument. I see a metric funckton of new construction and they are ALL 400k+ which is a lot for our smaller/mid city. Existing inventory is averaging the same.
Yes some construction happens. It’s still profitable in some cases, especially when the target market is the richest segments of society.
But there could be so much more. They could build two houses on each of those plots of land, and maybe each house is only $250k but you’ve managed to get $500k of real estate out of the same plot of land which (as any good capitalist will tell you) is better than $400k of real estate.
But you can’t do that. Density restrictions. Zoning laws that are way too narrowly defined, ie bloated, and have long since surpassed the “Don’t boil horse carcasses next to a daycare” sort of scenario by which zoning laws are explained in our history books.
Instead of just protecting public health zoning’s now also protecting people’s views, protecting people’s lawns, protecting people’s resale value on their homes.
Like, oh your view of Mt Shasta got blocked by an apartment building? Gee that sucks but it also doesn’t suck that five hundred new apartments are on the market now, weakening the monopoly some local cartel has on pricing and slowing the rise of rent prices.
We have a sort of overton window in terms of how much construction is “a little” and how much is “a fuckton”. Living our lives in this kind of supply crackdown has calibrated our sense of how much construction is a fuckton.
Just imagine that construction you’re seeing … but twice as tall. Perfectly conceivable, even financially favorable to the people who would make it happen, but literally not allowed.
This is an excellent and erudite comment. I’m curious what industry you work in. And did you make up “Don’t boil horse carcasses next to a daycare”? Because I’m fucking keeping it, funniest shit I’ve read all day. Keep it up mate
They just to apply themselves, get out there and hustle, bring value, and make others rich! /s
Problems also in the UK
But don’t forget it’s all Biden’s fault. Especially in the UK.
Both countries run by right wing partis. Coincidence?
okay, but the GDP…
But Biden fixed the economy it’s better than everrr!
The economy has little impact on price gouging and you better believe rent is being gouged to fuck.
They all collude too, example: https://m.slashdot.org/story/406219
Your post has “Biden did that” in relation to gas prices energy
Nah it’s a counter to statements like this: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/us/politics/biden-speech-economy-chicago.html
It’s probably more a tongue in cheek response to the “everything is fine” attitude they seem to have
I would be on the same page as you except Biden tried to take a victory lap on the economy. We’re in the backlash of that right now. You can tell because they’re scrambling to look like they’re lowering prices on anything they can.
He didn’t do that, and he hasn’t corrected or even addressed it until campaign year.
Homelessness is a very complex issue encompassing things like mental health and climate change. The president has no direct control over rent prices, they may be able to influence them to a degree, but that’s all. This is an integral part of late-stage capitalism. People in need are being left behind because America is filled with greed. One of the many things to help alleviate this would be the construction of subsidized dense housing in areas with high levels of amenities.
Number go up!
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Lol presonal accountability? Over a quarter are children. And the rest, a majority have mental and physical disabilities. Studies show around 40% to 60% have jobs. Very few are homeless by choice.
ah I should I put /s or something, it was a lyric from Capital G, NIN song.
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