>half the people on these boards step over a homeless person to get to work every morning.
But don't you think half the people on these boards would also support a vast overhaul of the tax system that prioritizes the military/war over services for the homeless? Currently 60+% of our taxes go towards the military. That's unbelievable. Why not chop that in half and redirect it towards welfare services? Or is that too hard? What possibly can 1 X HN-user do when passing said homeless person? Create a homeless shelter? OR: better to demand the government to stop _squandering_ the thousands in taxes he gives a year and to redirect it to the poor man she/has passes every weekday morning?
I think the issue is more complex than you make it out to be, IMHO.
Come on... The budget for military spending in 2016 was 15-17%.
What you're regurgitating was actually a hoax/misleading meme photo that propagated that number in order to paint Republicans as war mongers. All it took was one Google search to confirm.
Ok, going purely by 2015 numbers, we spend 609.3Billion on Military. Only 16% of the budget, right?
Then how can China (our next biggest competitor) get away with spending only 150-200 Billion? Why are we spending more than three times the amount China is spending on military? How can Russia (our perceived biggest threat right now in the media zeitgeist)...only get by with threatening us with a paltry 66 Billion? Think about that: we as a nation have collectively decided to outmatch Russia by ten fold. This way of spending is out of control, and I'm not sure how else I can get this very simple point across.
I think it's clear to anyone that we could easily assuage some of the real problems of homelessness if we just cut our Military budget in half.
That would still put us ahead of China, far ahead of Russia, _and_ we'd help those who cannot help themselves immensely.
But I know what the response is going to be: "Big Stick" and all that oft-repeated Military-Industrial justification.
I'm sorry but there's no excuse no matter how you slice it, even if my initial numbers are wrong (which I concede) it's still a terrible situation.
There are plenty of people who are trying to become American, as well. My wife came here from Iran to study at an American University, and her conditional green card is set to expire next year. We want her to get her citizenship as fast as possible. Now it seems that USCIS has put all that on pause though, so we're sweating bullets over whether they'll actually let us file the petition to have the conditional aspect removed in a year's time. If they don't, we're fucked and all of the work and money(read: thousands of dollars) we put into putting her through the system properly will have been all for nothing. FYI I'm an American citizen.
married to a citizen doesn't magically grant you anything. It makes you eligible for a K1 visa, and from there you join the same path from greencard to citizenship as everyone else.
Specifically, there's a minimum residency period before you can apply - usually 5 years, 3 if you're married. The conditional greencard is the first 18(? 24?) months, before you get the 10yr card - so if they're still conditional, there's no way they meet any minimums.
The path from marriage to citizenship is not automatic (nor inalienable).
See Soneil's response. She does qualify for it, but it's not instant. You have to be on a conditional green card for two years, then on a regular green card(which lasts ten years). We have to wait another year before we can have the conditional aspect of her green card removed. But with USCIS allegedly pausing it, even if we try to get it removed, nothing will move forward, but the clock will keep ticking till it expires.
There are per-nation limits on the number of green card holders that can become citizens every year. Maybe they want to be citizens, but aren't allowed to be?
Meanwhile, a lawyer friend of mine had to advise a client of his not to go home to visit his dying father, because he might not be allowed back in. He's lived in the US for twenty years. He owns a business that employs six US citizens. He won't get to see his father again, and a father won't get to see his eldest son on his deathbed.
Do you have any idea what's involved in an immigrant from a Muslim country becoming a citizen? Without some sense of the requirements, you're assuming he doesn't want to be a citizen, when it's quite possible that he does, but hasn't been able to due to quotas.
>Why weren't we funding the ACLU to help these people?
Well, I think that's easy to answer. People care more about causes when it affects them personally.
For better or for worse, few of us are strict utilitarian maximizers. I haven't quite settled how I think about it, myself.