hyperlinks and video live at source: http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-County-Nonpartisan-Examiner~y2009m9d3-All-government-cost-studies-sheltering-the-homele...

The US Interagency Council on Homelessness has found that all cost-benefit analyses show that paying for the homeless to have minimal housing, food, health care, and job counseling costs less than public costs of their street life. The greatest savings come from decreased emergency room visits, police calls, and court time. What isn't counted, and significant, is the increase of business in areas where the homeless are vagrants. In addition, these studies show most of these participants find jobs and leave these programs.

As always, please share this with all who say they want to be responsible citizens.

Philip Mangano, former Director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, provides an overview of the US and local government's experience of the costs and benefits:

Report: Engineering society needs ethics policy

By CAIN BURDEAU – 18 hours ago

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A task force is calling on the American Society of Civil Engineers to come up with an ethics policy after critics raised questions about the group's probes of the World Trade Center collapse and the failure of New Orleans levees during Hurricane Katrina.

Critics say the probes, commissioned and funded by federal agencies, were more about covering up human and agency misdeeds than determining what went wrong with the failed structures.

Last month, the society's Task Force on Engineering Reviews said Reston, Va.-based ASCE should draw up an ethics policy to eliminate questions of possible conflicts of interest.

The panel started work after Raymond Seed, a levee expert with the University of California-Berkeley, sent a 42-page letter to ASCE in October 2007 accusing it of colluding with the Army Corps of Engineers to cover up engineering flaws found after Katrina struck in August 2005. Seed was on an independent levee investigation team funded by the National Science Foundation.