In 1980, largely in response to growing concern over human rights abuses in the asylum system, Jimmy Carter passed the Mental Health Systems Act, which created direct federal funding for community based mental healthcare centers. When Reagan came into office he repealed everything with his sweeping Omnibus bill. He turned the funding into state block grants, which many states rejected, much like during the Obama era Medicaid expansion. The result is what people are referring to when they say that we shut down the mental hospitals and moved them into prisons.

Countdown until they start calling people with disabilities “useless eaters”?

We need an income tax and wealth tax on those with over $50m in assets (including taxing the base 50m). Then we can close existing shortfalls from the pandemic, reduce or eliminate sales tax, and have a better and more equitable tax structure.

Which will be incredibly important, since that fucking cunt is going to blow a massive hole in our $60b+ in our yearly exports.

The state facilities could always be better, but they’re underfunded and the state employees union means the worst employees stay on being the worst for years at a time while the best employees have to pick up their slack.

That being said, I’m entirely unconvinced that they’re going to fare better because not all of them have family to turn to, unlike Mr. Raymond in the article. He’s very lucky to have a niece with enough financial stability and willingness to care for him. This article deeply overestimates how many disabled people have access to that.

I don’t like the state facilities and think they need better funding, more controls on who works for them, more power to remove employees who are dangerous to the patients, more freedom for the patients, and so on.

However, I know for a fact having known many caretakers here in Washington in my life, that the private facilities are more costly, have even fewer protections, regularly hire terrible people, underpay the caretakers, don’t give the caretakers the tools they need to effectively care for their wards, and treat the people at the facilities as bad or often worse than the government run facilities.

And honestly I’m disgusted that this article starts with Mr. Raymond’s memories from how things were carried out in those facilities over fifty fucking years ago versus how they are carried out today. Things have changed a great deal for the better, in that time, and they could change a great deal for the better if we gave them opportunity to do so. Yet it starts out with fear mongering from a by-gone era and spends almost no time discussion current conditions at all.

Final note, Washington doesn’t have an income tax, and has one of the most regressive tax structures in the US. Maybe if we bothered to actually change that and get that capital gains tax finalized and accepted by the courts we could actually afford things like this instead of always throwing our fucking hands up and going “whoopsie doodles we don’t have enough money time to cut services for the poor again.”