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Your July 12 editorial implies that we should spend more taxpayer money on the homeless, saying, "The state needs to step in and take a larger role."
What if you ran an editorial saying, "Spend millions of tax dollars on drunks, drug addicts, and criminals?" Logically and factually there is considerable overlap between those two statements.
The homeless, by their nature, are quite mobile. As cities like Denver and Salt Lake City pour more millions into free housing and other extensive benefits for the homeless, without work requirements or moral reawakening, the homeless naturally flock to those cities, making grand plans to "end homelessness" in a particular city grand failures.
Without these failed government efforts we would not have the large and toxic concentrations of homeless people and associated criminality in particular areas. In a free society there would be a few people in need in any particular neighborhood. Neighbors and churches would be able to discern the deserving needy from the shiftless, from the addicts and from the criminals, and there would be the ability to put people to work in ways that are no longer possible in our regulated and taxed society.
Martin L. Buchanan
Midvale