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Comment on Ask HN: Do you help beggars?

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When I was 8 or so, I saw a homeless guy lying on a bench in New Orleans, and I had a five dollar bill in my pocket, and even though five dollars was very hard for me to come by, I gave it to him. I felt very good about myself, at the time.

In retrospect, I probably would have put that five dollars to better use.

People live like that because they can live like that. If you give them cash, you're enabling their lifestyle.

I fed homeless people from a portable soup kitchen a couple of weeks ago. If you want to genuinely help people who genuinely need it, give them directions to a soup kitchen and social workers who know how to deal with them.

But the chances are that they already know where they can get real help, and they'd rather stand around earning $20 or more an hour asking people for cash. http://www.quora.com/Homelessness/How-much-money-do-beggars-...

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