How do you react to begging homeless.

It varies, depending on the situation. My wife and I prefer to avoid homeless in large cities, like New Orleans, where we've been a couple times. You get the real crazies in cities. In smaller towns, it's not as big a deal. We do give occasionally; one time in particular I remember someone coming up asking for money for food specifically, and she had some leftovers from a small pizza place we had eaten at a little while earlier, so she gave that to the man (he had a dog too, that probably helped his case with my wife, although at the same time she's of the mindset where "homeless can barely take care of themselves, how can they take care of an animal too?"; but I digress). One of my friends had a homeless he would walk by occasionally on his way to a local store. Sometimes he would buy something for the guy while at the store and hand it to him on his way back home, and chat with him for a little while. The implicit deal, as I understood it, was "don't beg me for shit and I'll get you some food from time to time". But the one time the guy came up and started actively begging, and that turned my friend off immediately. "Fucking no loyalty" he said. It seems from lots of the responses here that most of us are conscientious, personality-wise. We basically are a "we handle our business" crowd, and so we likewise expect the same of others. I'm not dissimilar, but I still feel a fair amount of sympathy too. Not trying to pass value judgments or anything here. And as @DocWizzle said, there are definitely some scammers out there. My dad saw a report on the news about some homeless making a couple hundred dollars a day from donations, where "begging" was basically their full-time job. After that, one time my paid attention right after he gave a _Burger King_ meal to a guy when they got his order wrong (burger wasn't eaten at all). He gave it to him and watched in his mirror as he drove off. The guy basically threw the bag on the ground and ignored it. So I think him telling me about that kind of kept me alert for scams in this regard, although I try to remain neutral and not paint all homeless in a negative light.