By Jenna Nand / Herald Forum
Gov. Jay Inslee is requesting another $100 million to shelter those cleared out homeless encampments in the state.
Wild statistics in the media speculate incorrectly that the state government spent approximately $1 million per homeless person for those it helped transition out of homelessness by clearing encampments, confiscating belongings and using the collective might of its authority to punch down on some of the most vulnerable people in our region. All on the taxpayer’s dime.
My takeaway from this statistic might be different than many of the conservative commentators who have opined about the government’s spending to fix one of our country’s most pressing issues: how to reintegrate a population that is openly reviled and alienated from our hyper-capitalist society. A society that openly mocks homeless men who are killed by trash compactors when they seek shelter in dumpsters.
As many politicians and TV commentators — including my mentor, Richard Painter — lament, the American middle class of the mid-20th century was not an accident. It was created by marginal tax rates on the wealthy, which forced corporations to actually disperse their excess revenue to their workers rather than hoarding for management and shareholders. Forced to return the wealth that workers created, our economy boomed and our civil society flourished, leaping ahead with a Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Liberation Movement that yielded long-sought victories like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade.
Inequality is expensive because it goes against human nature. It requires greater and greater artificial separation between “classes” of humans, until the aristocracy has to build a Versailles on the backs of its own starving peasantry to try to maintain the illusion of its innate superiority. This system of government usually collapses spectacularly from within after generations of indolence and rot. Ask the Romans, ask the Confederates, ask the Russian Tsars, this is the fate of all societies based on artificial inequality.
I don’t want to live in Versailles. I don’t want to deny the humanity of my fellow humans. I don’t want my grandchildren to meet the guillotine, or whatever form Mutually Assured Destruction will take in the 22nd century. I don’t want future generations of Americans to hate people who have more or less material possessions than they do. I don’t want a “real” American to be defined by his or her bank account.
This “us versus them” attitude is the last thing we should be promoting in this time of deep political polarization and widespread distrust in government and societal institutions. No one “wins” when our society ceases to function due to “othering” and open hostility between neighbors.
As the state is learning from the expenses of homelessness, it costs a lot more time, money and effort to mend a broken human being than to protect him or her from being broken in the first place. This is a trade-off, we can invest in public services for under-served segments of society to improve quality of life for everyone, or we can pay much more for law enforcement activity to antagonize over-policed communities and “other” our neighbors, creating a vicious intergenerational cycle.
The disaffection of our youth, and the attendant crimes of despair that we are seeing skyrocket, were accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic. As Vice President Kamala Harris put it, this virus had eyes, and it killed the most vulnerable among us. It disrupted our lives and exacerbated the effects of other public health crises like the opioid epidemic.
How do we fight despair? That’s hard. What is slightly less hard is fighting poverty, often the root cause of despair.
If one area in a region has a demonstrably lower quality of life due to fewer parks, fewer public amenities, fewer good schools, fewer of everything except fewer crimes, then all of the other parts of the region should rationally find it to be mutually beneficial to invest taxpayer funds into the underfunded area.
From a perspective of pure self-interest, all parts of a region should pursue investments in public goods that would lessen criminal activity, which disproportionately pulls law enforcement resources into this under-served part of the region. We all have to pay for public safety in our area in a nearly per capita fashion, from the police force to the firefighters. And we are all at least tangentially affected by the rising crime rate.
We all intuitively understand that equality is less expensive than inequality because it is rational. If my neighbor needs to be incarcerated because of drug addiction and crimes of desperation, then he is a drain on public resources. But if my neighbor is clean and sober and able to function in our society again, not only is he not a drain on public resources, he can actually be a taxpaying contributor to public coffers.
In my law school game theory class, we learned that this is a tactic called “cooperative tit-for-tat” that was usually the most successful tactic in any rational game. To try to distill my professor’s excellent class to one sentence: If I can trust my neighbor and my neighbor can trust me to keep our promises to each other and work together, we can win together.
Let’s stop despairing at our collective misery and try to win together again. In my eyes, saving a human life is worth nine figures on a balance sheet any day. I view the $100 million ask by Gov. Inslee as an investment in ending an intergenerational cycle of poverty that will otherwise plague our state for decades to come and cost our society billions of dollars in the future. But I’m just one voice and one vote in a still-functioning democracy.
Jenna Nand serves on the Edmonds City Council, Position 7. The views expressed are her own.
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