People's obsession with not getting ~swindled~ by folks who are begging for money in the streets is...fascinating on a bunch of levels.

Mostly just like...y'all realize you get actually ripped off by rich people all the time, right? Just like...constantly.

This is especially fascinating when it becomes wrapped around moralizing about substance use.

In part because people's complete misunderstanding of addiction, poverty, etc becomes really obvious.

But also because you know who spends a lot of your money on drugs? Rich people.

Anyway. Who cares if someone "gets" you for ten bucks every now and then? Most people really do need the money, and they do in fact know what they need better than you or any organization does.

I'm also just 0% invested in being shitty to people because they're addicts or use substances in a way that I don't think is appropriate. That doesn't help anyone in the slightest.

Addiction only causes poverty in that we live in a place where if you stop being able to work, you become poor because we refuse to take care of each other.

Much more often the other way around is true. Poverty causes addiction. Or the poverty and the addiction have a shared cause of some kind.

In any event, you're not doing shit about it by refusing to give someone the $5 you have in your wallet

In summary: if someone is going to the effort of begging for money on the street, they probably need it and you should give it to them.

Focus your worries about being ripped off on the people who are systemically ripping us all off. Be mad at an overdraft fee or something.

Addendum: I'm saying "begging" rather than "panhandling" on purpose because it is my sense that "panhandling" as a term obfuscates the actual issue here, which is poverty