You Want to Drug Test Welfare Recipients?

[Speaker to Animals]

They obviously didn't use the food stamps to get food..

[jbird4049]

They obviously didn't use the food stamps to get food..

And thaaaat's what drives me bananas. The idea that maybe someone, somewhere, and somehow is abusing the system so let's make it harder for everyone. There are always going to be scammers, fools, and just plain stupid people abusing the system, but somehow it's the small fry, not the big sharks that get the blame, and the punishment.

If almost everyone could get a decent job that paid more than starvation wages, along with public assistance actually, truly assisting needed people, and the weasels in the state, and federal, government along with their corporate overlords were all doing perp walks followed by extended stays at Club Fed, or better yet, some place like San Quentin, or Folsom, I would would be okay with some testing.

We are so from that, it's not even a joke.

[Okeefenokee]

They obviously didn't use the food stamps to get food..

And thaaaat's what drives me bananas. The idea that maybe someone, somewhere, and somehow is abusing the system so let's make it harder for everyone. There are always going to be scammers, fools, and just plain stupid people abusing the system, but somehow it's the small fry, not the big sharks that get the blame, and the punishment.

If almost everyone could get a decent job that paid more than starvation wages, along with public assistance actually, truly assisting needed people, and the weasels in the state, and federal, government along with their corporate overlords were all doing perp walks followed by extended stays at Club Fed, or better yet, some place like San Quentin, or Folsom, I would would be okay with some testing.

We are so from that, it's not even a joke.

We already came to the agreement that corporate welfare should go.

[jbird4049]

Irving Feldman was accused of two different schemes, one netting more than $1.2 million and the other more than $200,000.

The more lucrative scheme involved unlawfully buying $1,227,063 worth of food stamps from willing recipients for less than half their face value, according to the news release. The recipients received cash, and Feldman was able to reap a considerable profit by redeeming the food stamps with the federal government for their full value.

The gambit, known as trafficking, is hardly unique to Upstate Fish and its customers. A small percentage of food stamp recipients nationwide engage in the practice of trading benefits for cash that can be spent on things that food stamps don't cover — cigarettes or beer, for example, or more prosaic items such as soap, diapers, gasoline or toilet paper.

The $1.2 million in food-stamp purchases took place between January 2010 and October 2015, according to the news release from the New York Inspector General's Office. That office, along with Rochester police, Monroe County social services and the federal Agriculture and Homeland Security departments, collaborated to reel in Feldman.

“This fish market owner was caught running a food stamp fraud scheme that was truly breathtaking in scale,” state Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott said.

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/sto ... /95525620/

I'm sure they illegally redeemed their food stamps for half the stamps' value in cash for perfectly legitimate purposes that have nothing to do with drug abuse..

Actually, sometimes that is the case. One can't buy shoes, or pay the electric bill with food stamps.

[Okeefenokee]

We obviously need shoe stamps.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Oh for f*** sake. Really?

Our country is choking on massive corruption all through both government, and business, in all states, with hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars being stolen, with hardly any perp walks, let alone any punishments on anyone except for a very, very few like office clerks.

Unemployment is effectively 10% nationwide, in places it's going far more than that. Aside from the top 10% of the population, income growth has started to go into reverse. Without food stamps, upwards of four million Americans are living on $2 per a damn day.

Just to get food stamps here in "liberal" California, you have to be making less that twenty thousand a year (of course, were there are jobs here, rents at a roach motel start at over a thousand a month)

Often those on food stamps don't have any pleasure except beer, or use pot to self medicate. Yet, we must have righteous, righteous anger at the most needy, least powerful people because "drugs"?

Yes, feel free to weigh in on the ethical, moral, or legal justifications for such wrongness.

+1000

Said it better than I could.

[Speaker to Animals]

LOL

Where did I argue we shouldn't have food stamps? Leftists are being ridiculous again.

[SuburbanFarmer]

LOL

Where did I argue we shouldn't have food stamps? Leftists are being ridiculous again.

WTF do you think Welfare is?

[Speaker to Animals]

Did I stutter?

[Penner]

This thread is TLDR, but I would like to add my two cents to the mix, here.

First, this idea has been tried and all they ever found out was that poor people aren't doing drugs but instead of have wasted like millions of dollars on the testing alone.

Here is an old article (back when this idea was getting a lot of attention- roughly a year ago):

According to state data gathered by ThinkProgress, the seven states with existing programs — Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah — are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to ferret out very few drug users. The statistics show that applicants actually test positive at a lower rate than the drug use of the general population. The national drug use rate is 9.4 percent. In these states, however, the rate of positive drug tests to total welfare applicants ranges from 0.002 percent to 8.3 percent, but all except one have a rate below 1 percent. Meanwhile, they’ve collectively spent nearly $1 million on the effort, and millions more may have to be spent in coming years.

https://thinkprogress.org/what-7-states ... .3kl1vy8nb

And like what jbird said above, maybe we should go after the top dog abusers, that are on the top instead of going after the little guy, first? Or maybe