So you're a billionaire! Congratulations!
Having definitely raised yourself up single-handedly by your own bootstraps, in the vacuum sealed existence that is certainly your life, you're now free to indulge in all your favorite personal habits. You've gotten this rich, all by yourself. You obviously deserve it.
But right now I want to offer you an exciting business opportunity. One that only someone with your amazing amount of income could possibly manage. One with a considerate initial investment, but which would quite literally self-automate into a money making venture. All you would have to do is get the gears turning, and the income would literally gain its own momentum. All you'd have to do is sit back and watch your numbers grow. Work smarter not harder, as the Bible says.
There are currently over 500,000 homeless individuals in the United States (1). I'm here to try to convince you that – as far as you should be concerned – this state of affairs is like leaving money on the table. All it needs is someone with enough chutzpah to make the initial investment, and that's you. Nothing ventured means nothing gained, and the greatest gains require the greatest ventures.
First, some clarity.
Even throwing out the "it could happen to you" self-interest conjecture (preposterous on its face, obviously; you've been anointed by the universe into being this rich) you're still leaving the opportunity of more money – for yourself – in the gutter by not helping them. No one's making any money off the homeless. If they were, they wouldn't be homeless. That's just common sense.
A worker trades his labor for a paycheck. The employer who employs that worker is making more money from that worker's labor than the wages that they pay back to that worker. That's simple economics. We'd also have a tenant who pays a landlord, or a homeowner who pays a bank or yearly taxes. Providing human creatures with basic living necessities can be quite lucrative, which we can see is really just a missed opportunity for high end profits.
None of this would be possible without first securing a place for these employees to live. They need somewhere to provide them the comfort, privacy, and rest in order to become useful and functional employees. Without living quarters, they cannot become employees (2). Without employees, business will cease to exist. Of course, I don't need to tell you that. You're a billionaire! You've only gotten where you are by your shrewd and impossibly brilliant business mind and hard work. Clearly.
It's my belief that there's an unimaginable bounty of untouched wealth resting in the laurels of these unhoused peoples. I currently intend to prove it.
For example: In 2015 the city of Denver made an enormous test investment in housing a section of its homeless citizens. At the cost of $13,400 per person per year, the city was then able to save $15,733 per person per year. That's a profit of $2,373 (3). Per person! Saving money from all the hospital visits, emergency services, jails incarcerations, assistance programs, and all the other things homeless people do to pass the time, whatever that might be (4)(5)(6). For every $1 put into the program, it gave a return of $1.17. Just by unhomelessing these people, they're already making money for you. The Los Angeles County alone reported returns as high as $1.20 for their similar program (7). Are you going to let local government take the profits of the American Dream from heroic small business owners like you? Of course not! That's why this investment in housing the nation's vagrants is the right way to go for any smooth company shark like yourself.
"Alright," you say, "How much is this magic ticket money-printing machine going to cost me for an initial investment?" I hear you! I'll bet you imagine it's some enormous number, unimaginable to the human mind. First of all, not the case. Obviously you wouldn't have even been invited to this presentation on this secret island in the uncharted Pacific if you weren't already a big hitter. It'll cost next to nothing for you. Too good to be true, I know! Listen to this.
I've drawn up a hypothetical situation to explain it. Let's imagine another billionaire, looking to take a chance of this great opportunity I dropped in his lap. Using a highly randomized A.I. name generator I invented, we'll call him Beff Jezos. Using another totally randomized number algorithm, let's pretend Beff has, oh I don't know, 189 billion dollars. Just to pick a huge and random number totally out of thin air.
Now, obviously the Actual Cost of this solution I'm talking about wouldn't change depending on who I'm talking to. That could be one number or another number, but once we figure out what that number might be, it certainly wouldn't change from investor to investor. I am nothing if not an honest businessman, as of course we all are.
The real question is how much would Beff actually feel the cost of the investment he made. That is a subjective measurement. That would differ from investor to investor. To put it simply, what percentage of your fortune could you look to risk in this guaranteed safe bet venture? That would depend on the size of your fortune. Let's look into it.
For one possible number, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (for the year 2021) has requested $3 billion in funding from the federal government for its baseline functional requirements (8). This would constitute 1/63rd of Beff Jezos' entire fortune. Only 1.59%. For a comparison as a random example, if someone else was, let's say, a delivery driver in their mid-30s with $2,500 in their bank account, they could fund the entire year's budget for the National Alliance to End Homelessness (at an equivalent proportion to their "fortune") for $39.68. Roughly three hours of work. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
Coincidentally, $3 billion would be nearly exactly what Jezos would pay if we assumed that his company voluntarily yielded to their 21% corporate tax rate on their profits without contesting and avoiding it with credits and deductions like they do every year, but what sucker would let that happen to their business without a fight? That'd be ridiculous. From our cold dead hands, I always say (9).
Let's even choose a larger number. Using Denver's number of $13,400 per person, let's multiply that by all the homeless people in America, to the best of our knowledge; 553,742 (1). If we multiply those numbers together, we get $7,420,148,000. Even that amount of money would only account for 3.9% of Jezos' money. $97.50 when put in the terms of our totally imaginary delivery driver. And remember, at even just the minimal rate of guaranteed return (from the Denver experiment) of $1.17 for each $1, Mr. Jezos would be looking at a return of $8,681,573,160. A profit of $1,261,430,360 at the lowest estimation. Effortlessly.
If these people are provided a warm, safe, and permanent place to live, they'll be far less likely to bring any trouble back out onto the streets that they've recently been rescued from. As far as other simple amenities; a single-profile Netflix account is $9 a month. If you multiply that by 553,742 people it's $4,983,678. Multiplied by 12 months is $59,804,136. Remember, that's the price for a full year for over half a million people. 0.0316% for Mr. Jezos. $0.79 for our delivery driver. A fee that a galactic level billionaire like yourself would only have to support until each person gets their own $9 of disposable income, and with a safe home from which to coordinate the sale of their labor, that won't take long. I would venture that every one of them would be able to stream their media by their own bootstraps within the year. A considerably small price to pay for clean streets. Making parks safe to play in, coffee shops calm to relax in, the space under bridges becomes safe to tell riddles from again, all while you rest easy knowing that you're filling your bank accounts, all from doing almost totally nothing. Never lifting a finger beyond the initial investment. Housing the homeless is like printing money. You'd be a fool to skip out on this chance, you super smart and beautiful billionaire, you. Good job just being you everyday. You hero you.
SOURCES
1) "The State of Homelessness in America"
2) National Alliance to End Homelessness – Housing First
https://endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/
3) "Study Data Show That Housing Chronically Homeless People Saves Money, Lives"
4) Housing First Helps Homelessness and Saves Money
https://upstream.mj.unc.edu/2019/02/housing-first-helps-homelessness-and-saves-money/
5) "Free Housing Helps Homeless Patients Achieve Better Healt
6) Ending Chronic Homelessness Saves Taxpayers Money
http://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Cost-Savings-from-PSH.pdf
7) "L.A. Homeless Housing Program Saves More Money Than It Costs"
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-la-homeless-housing-money.html
8) Federal Funding for Homelessness Program
https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/federal-funding-homelessness-programs/
9) "Amazon had to pay federal income taxes for the first time since 2016 — here’s how much"
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon-had-to-pay-federal-income-taxes-for-the-first-time-since-2016.html
10) www.netflix.com, also I'm a millenial
Wherein I Explain The Punchline
Which You Must Never Do, But I Want A Good Grade
Trying to imagine the audience for this piece was actually one of the more challenging aspects of writing this essay. It was difficult to even start until I had some kind of answer. To be honest, the final working answer I landed on was myself. I think philosophy can have a lot more art to it, when compared to the usual other methods for ascertaining knowledge. I had an idea, and I wanted to see if I could write four pages about it. Once it was finished, then I could think about what kind of audience would eventually enjoy what I had made. When I was trying to think of that imaginary group of people before writing, I was far more paralyzed from even initiating the project.
Having written it, I can look much more objectively at Who This Essay Is For. Now that it's finished, I can list its qualities far more easily. I would say that this article would definitely be a great read for anyone who already believes that how this nation deals with its homeless people – and in a related respect, how it deals with the obscenely lucrative upper class – is a moral failure of quite literally staggering proportions, the likes of which border on genocide of an entire economic class, which is unique only because it's different from the usual racially or culturally specific attempts at eliminating human beings on a mass scale. By not taking (proven here almost literally effortless effort) any action to alleviate the suffering of a particular group of people, every action performed by these billionaire – both now that they're billionaires, and retroactively whatever actions they performed in order to get to where they are now – is devoid of use for society, if not definitely harmful, and should be looked down on.
The mechanic of comedy that I used while making this point is two fold. First of all, it's more fun, not just for me to write, and also more importantly for the audience to take it in. We're talking about several morally disgusting things occurring here. This amount of medicine is going to take a equivalent amount of sugar for any reader to choke down. Secondly, it speaks directly to the specific audience I mentioned; An enormous requirement of A Joke is that you Get It. This work speaks to people who, as I said, already believe that how we treat (or more specifically, ignore) homeless people in this society is unforgivable and uncomplicated. It's wrong, unequivocally. I'm not looking to spend time convincing anyone of that. If you don't already believe that human beings deserve to be treated better than this – from previously reading not only the writers in our class but in fact any of the thousands of moral writers in our nation's history – I'm probably not going to be the one to convince you. This article, as well as the Housing First resources I use, and (I believe one could argue) the Supreme Court decisions we've read have somewhat of a shared justification that a human being cannot reach any potential (much less their best potential) without first securing a place to live safely. Deciding what to do to solve that issue is going to have to also include figuring out what to do with the people who could solve this problem effortlessly but decide not to. This essay suggests that they should be virulently ridiculed, at the very least. Tricked out of their fortune, ideally, but I admit the likelihood is slim. But one can dream.
This article is made for people who already know and personally deeply feel that what's happening is wrong, who already Get It, but who perhaps lack the language to express their deeply held beliefs. This article can provide that for them. I have statistics and facts, math and subjective budget comparisons, and strongly supported opinions, all dressed up as a time-share style "sucker born every minute" seminar, on a private hidden island in the center of the Pacific Ocean, written with several gallons of dripping sarcasm disguised as fawning billionaire flattery, all a secret code for loathing directed at the type of people who could easily do something about it all but are deciding not to. The audience that would appreciate this essay already knows the current scenario is wrong. Now I've given them facts, charts, experiments, numbers, and a (very memorable, if I may say so myself) context to couch it all in and to recall it all with. This is how I enjoy writing to the public when I write my philosophy.
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