Elon Musk said he'd end world hunger if that were something that could be done. The United Nations World Food Programme did the math: $6.6 billion per year. That's it! You can guess how much the world's richest man has donated toward this cause...
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Last I heard he NEGATED $43.8 Billion dollars of aid by cutting USAID, causing the deaths of 4.5 Million Children around the world.
How Much Would It Cost to End World Hunger?
The U.N. World Food Programme feeds over 100 million people facing severe hunger in more than 120 countries and territories every year. In 2021, WFP did this with a budget of $9.6 billion dollars, which was still $5.2 billion dollars short of their total funding requirements. Clearly, ending world hunger will require more money.
Back in July of 2021, former U.N. World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley mentioned it would take an estimated $40 billion each year to end world hunger by 2030.
Edit: I should add, that they should still do it. Split it between the billionaires. Fuck, Elon is worth a trillion dollars
But you see the billionaires don’t have any money, just a number they keep pumping up.
They don’t have any money, except when they do. They have all kinds of money for stock buybacks and bribes to government officials but when it comes to paying taxes suddenly there’s no liquidity.
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Just for perspective, a person who invested in the stock market recently and got a 5% return would be said to be investing poorly.
5% may not seem like much, but just for comparison, 5% of a trillion dollars is 50 billion dollars. I think you can see the point. Musk could solve world hunger, and it would be like chump change to him, even if he did fairly poorly with his investments. He wouldn't even have to touch his savings.
He's refusing to help people whose lives are being ruined without that help, or who are dying, even though the only penalty for Musk is that he would be getting inconceivably richer at a slightly slower rate.
It's like he's sitting on a mountain of life preservers amid an ocean of drowning people
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I would like to permenantly house and feed myself for $16k. I have cash. Tell me how
It’s likely a room in a boarding house, and food through a volunteer kitchen - so that $16K is still being subsidised through private charities and/or local + state Government grants.
Don’t mistake me, though - I’m all for these types of programs. They’re a hell of a lot better than a swathe of people being homeless on the streets, or incarcerated in an overcrowded prison.
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You're not counting the value of the slave labor.
Nor is the fact mentioned that most prisons in the U.S. are run by and as for-profit private companies.
That is why so many people are incarcerated in the U.S., and unpaid slave labor is part of this multibillion-dollar business.
It is a business that, for entirely obvious reasons, no other democracy in the world allows in this absurd form—only the U.S., the "Land of the Free."
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They don't care because the breakdown is:
The tax-payer is out 66k in order to imprison the homeless That 66k goes to a prison, the prison makes money The imprisoned person is enslaved to prison labor, which the prison then leases out. The prison makes money.
The prison lobbies politicians to be "tough on crime" and pass laws that criminalize more and more things instead of helping people, that way the prison will make more and more money.
The people would be happier, healthier, and pay less in taxes if we just helped people, but we never will because helping people doesn't make prisons money. Same thing for policing. Police, as an institution, did not begin as law enforcement. They began as slave catchers. Their attitude and overall goal has remained the same. The police exist to ticket and fine people wherever possible in order to generate revenue, and, when able, arrest and charge people with the goal of filling prisons with slave labor.
If you eliminate the part of the 13th amendment that says 'except as punishment for convicted crime' and make slave labor illegal period, and in fact, make it illegal for any entity anywhere to profit off of incarcerated persons, you will eliminate a metric shit ton of problems in the U.S.
The prisons sue the states when not enough prisoners come in. That's the state of things.
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They've just re-instituted slavery.
That's called slave labour. Here you go again USA.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
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Republicans are a cancer to this world
Slavery with extra steps
If a person has a criminal conviction for homelessness, how likely they are to pass the background check with that conviction?
It feels like poor->homeless->convict->unemployable->indentured servant is the expected career transition.
It's been known for 50+ years that incarcerating a person is the most criminogenic you could do to them. It increases crime. It solves none of the problems it uses to nominally justify its existence
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Prison (hell #1) and homelessness (hell #2): the two whips of the capitalist state to lash us into wage labour slavery. "No underpaid job can be too bad to accept, or do you want to risk not be able paying your exorbitant rent, risk to become homeless? Sell your labour for the lowest price so some capitalist can make 2-3 times the profit of what you gain, which is bareley enough to pay another capitalist your rent." This is what the capitalist state enforces by holding up these two hells. We don't have a prison system by accident, homelessness is not a natural phenomenon. They exist by design. It's not about the money that prisons cost in comparison to what housing a homeless person costs. The money for prisons is a fair price to pay for a capitaliat state given the MUCH larger sum of money that its capitalist class can extract of us by making us obedient and doing the even shittest job for the shittest pay to suck the most possible surplus out of our work. Become communist. Sabotage. Seize the means of production. Be a grain of sand in this machine.
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The South loves slavery, more at 11. This is why the US should have punished the Confederacy as the treason it was instead of coddling them.
I just wish President Grant had punished the South more during Reconstruction but it wasn’t that popular at the time unfortunately and his corrupt administration certainly did not help.
Important to note this isn't new or restricted to red parts of the country. Vagrancy laws, laws against loitering, etc are all ways of criminalizing the poor to ensure we are all loyal wage slaves, and to a lesser extent feeding the prison-industrial complex. Many Steinbeck novels touch on this so it was a prevalent cultural touchstone in the 30s
To be clear, those rules were all ways of criminalizing BLACKNESS in the immediate aftermath of emancipation because the freed people had nowhere to go and nowhere to sleep. And since racism is a system designed to get the working class to do the dirty work of the owning class, it makes sense that laws intended to enforce racism get used against all poor people in relatively short order.
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Criminalize existing, to make slaves.
Tax subsidized slavery for anyone who can't afford a home?
What a horrible state.
Cool, state run slavery.
How does 16k permanently house and feed someone? Is that yearly cost? Where?
Mass housing dorms, basic shared facilities and cheapest tasteless grub for a person for 16k yep would work. Also I doubt any of them would reject volunteer labor or learning vocational crafts so they can survive have roof and warm food.
I have a family member who chooses to live homeless and after many years of being around him and others in the homeless community I can tell you that many would reject this. On a positive note, some would welcome it.
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All of America's laws are based on what puritanical, religious losers want.
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These numbers are going to need context.
$66,000 for how long? A year? Median across all sentences regardless of length?
If $16,000 houses AND feeds a homeless person permanently, how long exactly are we letting them live before euthanasia? There's no "permanent" when it comes to feeding or even housing, both include ongoing costs. 16 grand is a couple of years' food costs for me. More than 1, fewer than 10.
Note that I'm not arguing against housing the homeless obviously. Besides the obvious "what the fuck" factor of making homelessness a crime, incarceration by definition can't be cheaper because it involves housing, feeding AND guarding them. I just would prefer there to be more context when numbers are thrown around like that.
Per year, per year. These are the yearly outlays for each.
How do they even tell if you're homeless? It seems like a pretty fallible conviction to ruin someone's life.. Like what if your bus got delayed?
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The post-Civil War south is why we have the prison labor system we have. Abraham Lincoln was too busy being dead to stop defacto slavery being implemented to the benefit of the loosing side.
I vibe with it but let's be accurate here:
Based on FY 2023 data, the average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Bureau or non-Bureau facility in FY 2023 was $44,090 ($120.80 per day). The average annual COIF for a Federal inmate housed in a Residential Reentry Center for FY 2023 was $41,437 ($113.53 per day).
(Please note: There were 365 days in FY 2023.)
James Wills,
Assistant Director/General Counsel,
Federal Bureau of Prisons.
[FR Doc. 2024-28743 Filed: 12/5/2024 8:45 am; Publication Date: 12/6/2024]
And you may not trust the suit who wrote that but keep in mind if they were corrupt and under-report themselves they'll basically be robbing themselves on federal contract negotiations in the future but if they were on the straight and narrow then they're morally obligated to keep the number accurate and as low as possible.
And the low end is closer to $20,000 while the high end (higher security) was near $75,000 and most interesting of all is that the food and healthcare combined is less than $8,000 but the cost of the institution itself (beds and housing) varies wildly dependent on location as would the amount needed to house people outside of prison, and almost half the cost is paying wages to prison staff including records keeping, attorneys, management, and a metric butt-load of guards.
So, the system is broken and they're trying to abuse prison labor to the extreme, especially private sector and this specific administration, but in theory some federal prisons are already approaching the efficiency of the 16k number.
You'd also have to put a number on the value of prison labor - it's unethical, but that never stopped the suits.
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