"What isn’t working is spending more money on it without changing behaviors. People are never going to [move] forward with their lives. You don’t want to be in a situation with public policy where you’re enabling really bad, destructive behavior."
It might sound kind of anodyne, but it's basically what leaders say when they're playing the personal responsibility card.
It's absolutely right to put emphasis on self agency, there's actually a very concerning trend in society that people expect the government to solve all problems and ideally even pay them for simply existing (see the antiwork movement). Should this sort of thinking gain popular support the problem is going to get much bigger than it already is.
Homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility, nor is substance abuse [1] [2]. They're systemic failures. When opium overtook China in the early 19th century, it wasn't because suddenly everyone decided they'd throw caution to the wind.
It's nonsensical and leads to intense political problems (see: "Welfare Queens"). We put ordinary people into extraordinarily bad situations, and then we blame them for not being extraordinary enough to dig out.
[1]: https://stjosephinstitute.com/understanding-the-relationship...
I guess it depends on exactly how you interpret his statement, but the core idea that money alone isn’t going to fix the problem seems reasonable.
I mean, if someone is out on the street due to addiction, they won’t recover without personal responsibility. If someone is on the street due to untreated mental illness, then yeah, personal responsibility likely won’t help.
I though his statement was relatively even handed.
It's simply not the case that people will start making better decisions to the point that homelessness diminishes to background noise. It's a non-solution. We have to question the perspective of a leader who keeps pushing clear non-solutions.
The end of the road of the personal responsibility argument is "'good' people shouldn't waste their resources on irresponsible people". But homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility (is anything?), so typically when leaders start talking about it, something else is up.
This is the crux of it. Your position disagrees with mine, that's fine, but please don't assume that bringing up an issue based on personal experience with the problem is a "red flag." That's disingenuous and unproductive.
You then go on to strawman a bizarre tale of a religious person being overly evangelical about a deeply individual experience. Homelessness is a problem of society, and people. Yes we cannot address the individual at every point in a conversation, but that shouldn't mean we can't talk about the problems affecting individuals.
