Well Fare and Not So Well

[from 4/21/10]

As I write this it's the day the city council votes on the anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance, which its supporters believe will do a world of good by cutting back on the worst panhandling in Seattle. The ordinance is truly a work of art, whatever else you might think of it. I should know, I've been to college. In fact, when I attended our local U of W back in the hippy days, I passed through the Art Building frequently to avoid rain, and learned from seeing the stuff on the walls what art was. The anti-aggressive solicitation ordinance is that good. I'd run off a limited series, individually numbered and signed.

Speaking of hippy days, we had a law against begging back then in the U District. I forget his name, it may have been Killer, but our anti-panhandling law was a cop who had brass knuckles under leather gloves for any dirty hippy caught either begging for quarters or jaywalking. He was eventually caught at it. To make amends, the city later provided extra crosswalks across the Ave, which are still there!

By the way, the real reason you let cops ticket whoever they want is so they beat fewer people.

Whatever happens with the current law, we here at Real Change, particularly we "editors" of the "editorial committee", think it won't actually put a stop to panhandling, and we applied our great minds to solving the real problem. First, one of us observed that most panhandling in Seattle really only occurs during the last ten days of every month. We wondered, why is that? It must mean that the GAU checks they're all getting only lasts 2/3rds of the month. Therefore the solution, this one of us said, would be to increase the check by 1/3.

As a mathematician, I immediately noticed that 1/3rd of 2/3rds is 2/9ths, so 1/9th of the month would still be unaccounted for. Could Seattleites bear an average of 3.38 days of panhandling? Of course not. Something else would have to be done.

Then I realized that just increasing the GAU check wouldn't solve the problem, because we all know that the extra money would just get spent all the faster at the beginning of the month. But I had a brilliant idea: Instead of loading the GAU debit card monthly, load it every 2 hours!

If we give them $1 every 2 hours, that comes to $365.25 per month, on average, which would be an improvement over what they're getting now, and they couldn't spend it all on the 1st. I was thinking what a genius I was for coming up with this plan, when it dawned on me that the sneaky bastards would just panhandle their way through one whole month, saving their dollars, and start splurging on the first of every successive month. They'd do it just out of spite.

But I can fix that! We make it so each dollar that's added to their EBT credit has to be spent before the next one is added. They'll never get together enough for a six-pack again, and they'll have to hang out at dollar stores all day and all night. They'll be too tired to aggressively panhandle! Heck, they'll be too tired to aggressively roll over!

Some people would say that these proposals are mean, but I have one more suggestion that I think will mitigate the meaner aspects. All the ideas I've so far considered assume that the annoying panhandler would rather collect free money than work as panhandler. If so, why not be mean? But what if he/she has a strong work ethic and would prefer to work hard at begging instead of taking free money from the state?

The solution: give him/her a job in advertising!

Seattleites can't stand to be panhandled off of, but they'll go out of their way to find a big screen TV to watch obnoxious Super Bowl half-time ads!