Panhandling SC's looking for handouts!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Last Saturday it was raining something fierce, almost flooding. It flooded further south. There he was out in the rain, smoking a cigarette with his carboard sign "Will work for food!"

"Tell ya what, if you help me bail out and mop up my flooded basement, I'll make you some nice roast beef with mashed potatoes and all the trimmings!"

Something tells me he wouldn't take me up on that offer

[Skrae]

My mom told me about this woman who was a real proffesional she encountered once. She was on her way to work when this woman asked her if she could spare anything, and she had the look down, when I say pro, I mean the pro the pros try to emulate. Anyway, my mom told her she didn't have any money, but she could give her her lunch, to which the lady acted very grateful. That night on the news, turned out the panhandler was caught, and was on the news, eating my moms apple from her lunch.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

If these guys were actually willing to "work for food", then they wouldn't be sitting on the curb with a sign that said "will work for food."

I don't know how it is in other towns, but in mine, you can show up at a job site ready to work, and they will pay you for the day. Not only that, but if you stay clean and sober, there are places downtown that will feed you and even lodge you. But then, you'd have to do work and not drink.

[Seshat]

I have a close friend who would be unable to function in any society which had a fully private health system. She's got a severe chemical imbalance in her neurochemistry that takes about six different drugs to stabilise. Here, in Aussieland, the government covers her living expenses and her drugs.

In return, when she's stable enough to function, she does volunteer work and helps out at rehab centres/respite care centres and the like. When she's not stable enough to function, she spends her days at the same rehab centres and stays there under the guidance and protection of their OTs and nursing staff. (Being out and about among 'normal' folks overstimulates her and she can become a danger to herself. In the rehab or respite care centres, she's safe and not scaring anyone.)

She hopes to one day be stable enough to get a real, paying job. But in the meantime, she's giving back to society what she's capable of, and at least is a minimal burden.

However, without the government drug funding, the drugs she needs would be far, far too expensive for her to manage on any sort of welfare allowance. The hospitalisations she needs wouldn't be affordable (and when she needs to be hospitalised, she needs it NOW). The years of psychiatric care it took to get her as stable as she is would have bankrupted Donald Trump (okay, maybe not him).

Whenever I hear about homeless people and panhandlers, I think about my friend and just how hard she'd find life without the welfare system we have. Sure, we have scammers - but society has to consider cost balances. Provide the care my friend and the people like her need, and some folks will scam the system but my friend and the others like her will be giving back what they're capable of.
Don't help my friend and the people like her, and they'll be out in the street, trying to silence the voices/emotions in their heads with alcohol or worse drugs, scaring people, begging for money. Or they'll be picked up by police who've got nowhere to put them but in the lockup for a while, until they get let out again and back into the street no better off than before.

I honestly don't know what the best thing to do is, but I tend to be in favour of providing medical treatment that's needed, to everyone possible.