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[quote=Anonymous]People become untethered from the sort of life where getting a job seems feasible. It can happen gradually and might have nothing to do with your physical ability to work. Loss of a loved one, medical debt, drug or alcohol addiction (your own or someone close to you). Often people wind up homeless for some length of time. Then it can be very hard to get back to stability. If you are homeless and/or have a drug or alcohol issue, it becomes very likely that you will have a criminal record -- homeless people are often arrested for things that housed people do regularly with no repercussions.

If you have no address, if you have debt, if you have a criminal record, it is incredibly hard to get a job. Any job. There are programs designed to help people in this situation but they are underfunded and oversubscribed. Plus people come to mistrust the system (or possibly never trusted it) after going through things like this. They are very rarely treated with kindness or empathy. People assume they are lazy even though it is much, much harder work to beg for money and live on the streets than to simply go to a paid job every day.

When I see homeless people or people begging, I never think of it as an indictment of that specific person. I have no idea what they have been through. But I think you can judge a society by how it handles people in this situation. We don't handle it well as a society and we obviously the solutions we propose (including "get a job") aren't working. I can see how someone winds up begging for money on a street corner. It's harder for me to understand how we, as a society, can see this problem as one of individual choices instead of larger systems that afford some folks few other opportunities.[/quote]

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