OPINION: The Tax on Being Alive

It’s a bit bizarre if you ever stop and think about rent. When you’re homeless, though, you have a lot of time to think, and it’s hard to think about anything other than paying rent.

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to find yourself homeless and don’t have friends or family to crash with, you quickly learn that there really is no place at all for you to go. Actually, the problem is sleeping- there are countless places to kill time for free, places where you can sit, stand, or pace without being chased out or looked at funny.  Homelessness really isn’t bad at all during the day.  There are shops, parks, libraries, cafes- plenty of safe, climate controlled areas to spend the day.  But when night comes and all the free places to linger shut their doors, things get tough.  And when the urge to sleep starts to overwhelm you, when all you want in the entire world is to simply lay down unmolested for a few hours, the difficult reality of homelessness sets in.

If you have a vehicle, it’s a bit easier-find a secluded place to pull over, lean your seat back as far as it will go, and try and get some sleep.  Every area has its own pro’s and con’s.  In a poor neighborhood, residents don’t call the police- they see far worse criminal activity than a person sleeping in their car.  But it’s hard to sleep in a sketchy area where a sleeping person in a vehicle-probably with all their world belongings packed into it-presents an easy target for robbery.  If it’s the summer, you’ll find yourself faced with a dilemma-the further down you roll your windows, the less the oppressive heat builds up in your car, soaking you in sweat and giving all your belongings the telltale scent of someone without access to a shower or laundry.  But the lower the windows go, the more danger (and strange noises in the night) you expose yourself to.  It’s not an easy decision to make.

You can try and park in a nicer neighborhood, but the odds of police interrupting you increase greatly.  If you are smart you’ll pick a spot near a major highway.  When the cops knock on your window, just say “I’m on my way home from work, I was tired and pulled over for a rest.” (Try to disguise the fact that you’ve got all your worldly possessions packed in there with you.  Resist the urge to hang your sweaty t-shirts on a coat hanger hooked above your window.  These are obviously not a sun visor.)  Maybe the police will buy your story or maybe they won’t, but at least with the “on my way home” you have plausible deniability.  It would be pretty hard for them to prove you are truly a vagrant and not just a weary motorist making a safe decision.  Most of the time you’ll just get an exasperated “move along,” a shorthand way of saying “I don’t hate you, but go be someone else’s problem.”

If you are homeless and don’t have a vehicle, your problems are much worse.  All plausible deniability of your homelessness is lost the moment you lay down in public.  In many places, there is nowhere that’s legal for you to sleep. As mentioned before, there are tons of public places you can be awake, but the moment you want to rest your head you’ll realize how bad the options are. Either find someplace deserted (risky for many reasons), congregate wherever the other homeless do (still not legal but usually de facto allowed), or crash someplace public and get hassled by the owner or police (humiliating, potential legal consequences.). There are no good options, but congregating in “acceptable” homeless areas like a train station is usually the best bet to avoid the shameful and humiliating “move along”, or even worse, legal repercussions. But some cities, exasperated with a growing homeless population, are starting to crack down by criminalizing homelessness and kicking out the unwanted.

In light of the impossibility of homelessness, what the heck are you supposed to do? If you weren’t fortunate enough to be born into a property-owning family or haven’t earned enough income through labor to purchase property, you have to pay rent. Granted, homebuyers have their own woes – it can be really expensive to own property simply because it can take a chunk out of the income in terms of mortgage or property tax and other additional costs (take a look at this post on how to lower property taxes in Texas, among other states). However, even rent is a sizable chunk of your income even for the most basic accommodations. In my area, $500 is about the bare minimum you can find, renting a single room in a run-down house owned by slumlords. This is about half the take-home pay of a full-time minimum wage job. In short: $500. Pay this much money every month, to someone (whose wealth was likely hereditary to some degree)… or else you are a vagrant and a criminal the moment you attempt to lay down.

There are rarely any other options. Whatever public spaces exists have policies to prevent people from living there. “The Park closes at Dusk.” “Camping requires a permit.” “No loitering.” You can’t just “Go West” and get a plot of land from the government anymore. No free acreage to sow and reap with your own labor. You can’t pitch a tent or build a cabin in the woods. Hunting and fishing require permits and have tight restrictions on when and what you can take- not enough to live off of. You aren’t permitted to be self-sufficient. Everything and everywhere is owned and has been owned for hundreds of years, and that ownership is passed down hereditarily. Most people are granted nothing, and must pay hundreds per month for the privilege of laying their head down on the ground. This is a tax on being alive.

A government is obligated to provide the necessities of life to its citizens, or at the least, the tools for them to get the necessities.  (If not, the social contract between citizen and state is worthless to the citizen.) In 19th century America, you’d be given a plot of land out West to make your way. Now, everything and everywhere belongs to someone and there’s nowhere for new people to go, and so you must pay for the privilege of living on someone else’s land. A minimum wage employee has to tithe 50% of his wages for the right to sleep without being a vagrant.  This is an enormous tax levied on the working class, a brutally regressive tax that bears a strong resemblance to feudalism.

A UBI should provide enough money for a human being to have all the things that he could provide himself in nature, in a world that isn’t divided into centuries-old hereditary land claims.  A UBI should provide enough money for food, shelter, heating, and a bit extra to trade for random necessities and shortfalls. $1000 a month per individual is a good starting point. This is not charity, this is a refund to the brutal regressive tax that is extracted from everyone who didn’t inherit sizable property holdings. No one should have to perform $500 of labor for some hereditary landlord every month simply for the right to lay down and sleep.  In the mid-to-late 20^th century, when wages were high and capital ownership was more equitably shared, the tax on being alive was not quite so burdensome and regressive.  But seeing as we have moved to the era of corporate welfare, massive wealth disparity, and laughably low wages, this tax has become more than the working class can sustain.  UBI provides a way to simply and directly refund this tax.

-Tom Radtke <thomas.radtke@gmail.com>