On Thu, 07 Sep 2000, Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> Excellent question. Looking at (for example) the proportion of visible
> hungry homeless people in the USA and Australia (that nest of socialist
> vipers), I think the answer is revealing.
>
> I'm sure there's an excuse, though.
You were a little quick on the trigger Damien! Check the stats.
Per the Australian government: ~150k out of 20M people are currently
classified as homeless by the Australian government. Note that this is
worse than it used to be; the number of homeless were marked at about half
that number a decade earlier.
Per various U.S. sources (primarily advocacy and academic sources): Total
homeless population in the United States is currently estimated at
500-750k and relatively stable, depending on the source. Total population
of the U.S.: around 260M.
So by my calculations, Australia has about three times as many homeless
people per capita. Your impressions aside, it would seem that Australia
has the bigger homelessness problem. Note that it also appears that the
Australian government subsidizes the housing of a much large percentage
of its population (>5%) than in the United States. I've never looked at
these statistics before, so I didn't really have any idea as to what the
results would be when I looked them up. I learn something new every day.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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