I Am Going to Say Something Controversial

A meaningful percentage of homeless people have often-crippling mental or physical conditions - but over half of the recipients of SSD (which is enough to live on in many areas) receive it based on purely mental issues, some of them quite trivial. Any one of those homeless people would qualify for enough free money and other assistance programs to live on.

But people with sufficient mental issues just aren't capable of going through the process to get on those programs. Giving them handouts does help them survive in a lot of cases, especially if those handouts are food and shelter, instead of money which some of them will just spend on booze or drugs (though some of them do spend it on food, and even the druggies usually buy enough food to not starve). What I wish is that instead of spending massive amounts on handouts - most of which are given to people who don't have crippling mental or physical conditions - we would instead spend that money on programs to help them get jobs, or to help them go through the process of of getting onto SSD, which is a program that I do believe in for people who are *truly* mentally or physically disabled to the point where they can't get a job (which most of its current recipients aren't).