# I pit the homeless men who defecate near my apartment **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 24, 2011, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-homeless-men-who-defecate-near-my-apartment/568789 "2011-01-24T15:29:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 73
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [January 26, 2011, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-homeless-men-who-defecate-near-my-apartment/568789/73 "2011-01-26T05:08:26Z")
> [@Starving Artist](#): > > My guess would be that social services were cut generally and that the administrators of those services made the decision to cut services to the mentally ill. Nice try, but it won’t hold up. Ronald Reagan’s budget proposals specifically targeted the provisions of the 1980 Mental Health Systems Act, among other things, for funding cuts. Likewise, Bush’s budget proposals as recently as 2008 specifically targeted the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for cuts. > [@Starving Artist](#): > > I haven’t been aware of any attempts to provide funding for care of the mentally ill. Have you? If not, then I don’t think it’s accurate to blame conservatives for refusing to fund it. Yes, conservative leaders are still actively including mental health services among their direct targets for cost-cutting. The most egregious recent example is the [budget proposal of Republican governor Sam Brownback to entirely defund the Kansas Neurological Institute](http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/14/compassionate-conservative-sam-brownback/). Conservative legislators in, e.g., Virginia and Texas are proposing similar cuts in to mental-health expenditures in state budgets. Sure, care for the mentally ill is merely one of dozens of social service efforts that conservatives want to cut out of the government on the plea of saving taxpayers money. But it’s no use pretending that the conservatives are somehow just innocently trying to reduce over-spending in general and the mental health services are accidentally getting defunded without their being aware of it. They’re deliberately specifying particular mental health services and organizations as targets for budget cuts. They know exactly what they’re doing. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-the-homeless-men-who-defecate-near-my-apartment/568789)._