I sincerely doubt that amount would end homelessness and hunger since markets would just raise prices due to the influx of money and the poor, particularly in third world countries would just keep demanding more gibs.
Oh, it gets a lot better than that.
I have a relative who volunteers doing admin work at an organization that helps clothe and feed homeless people in our area. According to her, simply giving money to people isn't likely to improve their standards of living in any meaningful way because poor people are often poor
for a reason. Said reason is more often than not not their fault, since being poor correlates very tightly with poor education, broken families and a lack of opportunities in life, but it's still a reason. It's still a cause that needs to be addressed, and idiots like Jim never think about it.
Give a homeless man 10 grand, no questions asked, and you'll likely see it all being spent in a week on drugs, schemes, or frivolous things. Even if he wanted to get out of the streets ten thousand dollars is just not enough to get someone to rebuild their life. Likewise, give a poor family 10 grand, and while
some of these families will have the foresight to use that money to pay off debts or to apply them to savings (or much more rarely investments), in the vast majority of cases you'll see them buying TVs, computers, phones, or other material comforts that don't make them any less poor. And sure, 10 grand would house a family in San Francisco for 3 months... and then what? Back to the streets or the ghetto with them. Feeding and housing people helps them at the moment, but they're bandaids that don't address the actual problem. And so, once the money runs out they're shit out of luck again.
Long story short, in order to actually help people you can't just give them the fish. You have to
teach them how to fish. It takes a lot of money, time and effort to uplift even just one person out of poverty, which is why the most successful programs run for decades, helping people from childhood to adulthood, usually with education and opportunities instead of just monetary handouts. And even that isn't foolproof, some people are just unlucky, or incompetent, or have their entire lives ruined by a single bad decision (scams are a very common source of debt, for example).
It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to meaningfully change someone's life for the better in a way that will last longer than the money you spent on them. You have to
invest in people to make it work.
But hey, it's too much to expect James "Overpriced Plastic is my Passion" Sterling to understand investments.
