New York Spends $80,000 a Head on the Homeless, None of Whom See a Dollar, and Japan Says 'That's Our Problem Too'
A report said New York City spends on the order of $80,000 a year per homeless person — well over 12 million yen — yet the people it is meant to help say they never receive a single dollar. Japanese commenters barely paused on it as an American story. Instead they treated it as one more instance of a universal 'poverty business,' in which money labeled as aid is skimmed off by contractors and nonprofits before it reaches anyone, and they mapped it immediately onto domestic targets like community-chest charity drives and Japan's own child-and-family agency. The reported spending is plausible, but the claims that recipients get nothing and that nonprofits pocket the difference rest on individual testimony and inference rather than confirmed fact.