Cruelty, yes, but let's not forget grift.

Not just cruelty. Someone else in another thread pointed out this is exactly what you would do if you're afraid of a civil war. Now, you've got an easily defended government center, and a large amount of people out in the streets that any opposing force will have to fight through in order to get to any of the governmental buildings (though really, we're only caring about the WH). Additionally, you have an oceanfront escape route if shit goes poorly.

And fear

Yep. Cruelty and intimidation.

was joe cruel or stupid? the administration is cruel

The point is to 'test run" military protection around the White House.

It worse than the country won't change - it's humanity that won't change.

How so?

Rich people in control of the city, it's businesses and services: nah, we don't do that here.

• ftfy

How else are you going to keep everyone else in line if the fear of being homeless isn't hanging over their heads?

Trump only ever claimed to be Christian to sell bibles.

He is, but his puppeteers aren't, they are evil and played the long game.

Never, because once you get to the levels of obscenely wealthy that the modern elite inhabit, the actual amount stops mattering, but the drive to maintain and increase it gets far stronger. Thus, they spend insane amounts on political lobbying to ensure that the government doesn't collect any money from them in taxes. As for paying for things like infrastructure, they'll never do that because spending money on that doesn't IMMEDIATELY net them returns, even if it would in the long run (better schools directly correlate to smarter, more productive workers; better Healthcare means people spend less time sick and are back on the job sooner; improved transportation means workers are early or on time, so production isn't held back as much).

Furthermore, the Elite (as it were) literally don't see the rest of us as people worthy of compassion or respect, let alone any money. Pretty sure that some studies have been done showing that, over a certain level of wealth, your brain and personality shift noticeably towards sociopathy. It's not exactly a particularly high number either, from what I recall; only a few millions of dollars.

Billionaires and other rich people will never fix society's problems unless we literally force them to at threat of life and limb, and there's little point in believing otherwise.

And herein lies the problem with capitalism. It creates the greed that undermines the very system that allows it to exist. This cannot be escaped because it’s systemic.

To a rational person, there is such a concept as “enough”, but not to the capitalist.

Would other costs go down over time? Housed people don’t need emergency healthcare nearly as much, and with a permanent address that would open doors to a lot of things.

It's a simplistic calculation, but it does seem that often doing the right thing ends up cheaper in the long run. It just doesn't benefit certain groups, so it's not an option. If a million a day was applied to not just pay for sheltering, but to find solutions there wouldn't be a problem to throw authoritative measures at, or use as a reason to tighten security and control. They don't want to fix the problem, it works for them.

When communist were forced on Poland by soviets in 1945 one of their tasks for the next decade (that continued until 1980 collapse) was to build houses and give it to people. Other tasks were less nice like killing opposition, but housing was indeed how they decided to spent the resources.

US could start a massive communal housing programm on federal budget. They chose not to.

Ok what about we increase the budget 4x? We can put each homeless person in hotel for $180 a day. The hotel shareholders would be happy too.

I get what you're saying, and I agree.

however I've also justified this by defining hate and cruelty as the method through which they achieve profit.

so to me, the message is the same

Because they are taking the entire cost of the operation, and dividing it by the number of folks deployed.

So that includes logistics, housing, food, equipment maintenance. Including those big expensive fucking trucks, etc etc. And of course, the MIC gets a big cut too.

Payroll is probably a small portion of that $530.

First, I'm going to heavily qualify this statement. Like, a lot. I have never served in any military capacity and I'm repeating something a member of the Canadian military told me, which could easily be wrong for 20 reasons.

National Guardsman are similar to our "reservists" and are not paid when inactive. If additional troops who were already trained but not active, we're then activated, that would account for additional costs.

So yeah, massive grain of salt but you asked and someone gave me a reasonable answer that seemed to fit. I have done no fact checking, though.

Your average national guardsman isn't getting paid $530/day. That's almost $200k/year.

Most of that cost is related specifically to this mission, just divided between all the personnel deployed for this statistic.