Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?

Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.

Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.

If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?

Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.

It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, but make no mistake these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).