You Want to Drug Test Welfare Recipients?

[Okeefenokee]

No, that's not what was found. Not even close. You'd know that if you read the thread where every one of Kath's bullshit news stories was shredded for being completely inaccurate.

[Martin Hash]

Welfare doesn't work because it blurs the line between who owes what? Does society owe the people or do people owe society? It's essentially a liberty question: from a liberty perspective, society is providing charity to some of its members but because it's charity, society can ask for something in return; unfortunately, that thing shouldn't be moral posturing. It should be an obligation to work, Make-Work if need be, then what a Workfare recipient does with their money is their business.

And, once again, what happens to the disabled, or those with disabled family members?

What is disabled? You mean, in a coma, lying in bed? Schizophrenic? Alzheimer's? A job taking care of REAL Disables counts as a job.

[LVH2]

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.

Yes.

Emphasis on the fact that this is self medication for many. When you're poor, you don't get your depression or anxiety diagnosed and treated. You just know that you feel like crap all the time, except when you get buzzed and watch TV for a couple hours a night, which gets you by, hopefully. What a strange idea that anybody who gets some help must become a robot worker monk.

Also, pot is way, way better for these conditions than booze. In fact, it can be pretty darn helpful, and make you more functional, which I can testify to first hand.

e.g. you have anxiety and can't sleep regularly, or for long durations. Between the anxiety and being tired all the time, you are a hopeless wreck. You smoke pot a couple hours before bed. You relax and feel good. You fall to sleep easily. Pot sleep is sub-optimal, but you get some rest. Much easier to hold a job in the latter state.

Also, unless we euthanize these people on the spot, don't forget to factor in the costs of their lives falling apart even more. Homeless people and criminals are expensive. More fun to spend money on punishing people for being fucked up though, I guess.

[Penner]

No, that's not what was found. Not even close. You'd know that if you read the thread where every one of Kath's bullshit news stories was shredded for being completely inaccurate.

Oh, my where is the evidence that poor people are all strung out on drugs (other than the legal variety) and/or using welfare money to buy drugs? Again, testing people on welfare seems more like a punishment for being poor than a solution to end drug/welfare abuse. Sure, there are probably some that do receive welfare that may be on drugs but the majority seems to be actually kind of sober, compared to their non-welfare peers. Now, I am not saying that people on welfare have their life intact, nor are better than the ones who were never on welfare, but it seems like we really like to punish everyone who even dares to go onto welfare to survive.

[Okeefenokee]

I already posted it. Over and over. Every article Kath posted made your same claim that no one is doing drugs, and every one of them was taken apart by others and myself. It's not everyone, but it's not even close to no one.

[Speaker to Animals]

They all turn out to be complete bullshit for several reasons.

One of the obvious reasons is that, if you select an applicant for testing, and they are drug abusers, then they decline the test and benefits rather than seek treatment or some other alternative to getting the food stamps. That article I posted earlier about Florida shows this very well. Somewhere around 18% of the applicants backed out when they were asked to submit a urine sample for testing.

Also, when the states do implement drug screening, people are more likely to quit abusing drugs, or decline to go onto the program.

Almost 1,600 people applying for welfare benefits in Florida have declined to undergo drug testing, which is required by a new state law. According to state officials, less than one percent of the 7,028 welfare applicants who underwent screening tested positive for drugs since the law went into effect in July.

Since so many applicants refused to take a drug test, it is difficult to draw conclusions from these findings, according to the Associated Press. A majority of positive drug tests were for marijuana.

http://www.drugfree.org/news-service/al ... g-testing/


Think about those numbers. A progressive propaganda outfit like Think Progress might take that news to say "OMG! Less than 1% of Florida welfare applicants who were tested for drugs showed evidence of drug abuse!!!"

That's basically the gist of the nonsense Kath posted.

But consider 1600 people said fuck it, if I am going to have to quit using drugs, then I will opt out of the welfare program. That's 18% of the initial applicants dropping out to avoid getting tested positive!

If there were no drug tests, 18% of the welfare recipients would be toking it up right now on the public dime.

Later, progs accused me of wanting to abolish food stamps and starve people to death, which I guess is par for course when they get cornered in an argument about such matters, but nothing can be further from the truth.

I am all for helping feed people who for whatever reason cannot feed themselves, even when they are not disabled or elderly. But I recognize that a significant percentage of people getting these benefits don't need them at least partially because they use the food stamps to fuel their drug habits. If you treat their drug abuse problem, then you do quite a lot more towards helping them become self-sufficient members of society than just throwing money at them, which in the case of drug abusers is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

And to preempt yet another silly quip, just because you give them EBT cards that are only supposed to be spent on food does not mean they can't spend that money on drugs.

As was illustrated here:

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..

This single fish market owner, and however many food stamp recipients were complicit, bilked tax payers out of over a million dollars in public assistance funds, most likely to pay for drugs. They obviously didn't need the additional food if they were willing to trade their EBT money in for less than half its value in cash..

[LVH2]

Do you think that, in the eyes of some people, you might spend an unhealthy amount of time online? Why don't you spend every waking second on self improvement, or fulfilling obligations?

What if somebody watches too much TV or porn? What if they eat too much bad food?

Should they be forced into government treatment programs to fix them?

What if they use TV in moderation and treat themselves to a single doughnut most mornings? Should they be considered TV and junk food addicts?

Should this be applied to all people receiving gov assistance? What if you receive tax breaks, or eic?

Also, I'm pretty sure that providing free treatment, along with ongoing welfare and drug testing, is not and never will be on the table.

Do treatment programs for people who have 2-3 beers, or half a joint at night even exist?

Another implication here is that we follow the brilliant standards of the NFL. If you treat pain and discomfort with pot, you should be pushed onto legal options like opiates.

If we're so concerned about healthy living among the poor, why not spend money intervening in ways that we know to be effective and non-harmful? Most obvious to me is, make school lunches nutritious and relatively tasty. Improve learning, behavior, physical and mental health (diminishing future drug use) and probably give the ole IQ a little bump.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Reps should occasionally favor some stuff like this to back up their talk of compassionate conservatism or what have you. It would almost certainly save us money in the long run.

Not as satisfying as coercing some wretch, who lacks the money or wherewithal to see Dr. Feelgood like a good suburbanite, into a drug test?

[Okeefenokee]

...

You are running wild with sensationalist hypotheticals. You should try to find your way back to reality where we're talking about real people taking money from other real people at gunpoint, and giving it to other people who then use it to buy drugs.

[Speaker to Animals]

Do you think that, in the eyes of some people, you might spend an unhealthy amount of time online? Why don't you spend every waking second on self improvement, or fulfilling obligations?

What if somebody watches too much TV or porn? What if they eat too much bad food?

Should they be forced into government treatment programs to fix them?

What if they use TV in moderation and treat themselves to a single doughnut most mornings? Should they be considered TV and junk food addicts?

Should this be applied to all people receiving gov assistance? What if you receive tax breaks, or eic?

Also, I'm pretty sure that providing free treatment, along with ongoing welfare and drug testing, is not and never will be on the table.

Do treatment programs for people who have 2-3 beers, or half a joint at night even exist?

Another implication here is that we follow the brilliant standards of the NFL. If you treat pain and discomfort with pot, you should be pushed onto legal options like opiates.

If we're so concerned about healthy living among the poor, why not spend money intervening in ways that we know to be effective and non-harmful? Most obvious to me is, make school lunches nutritious and relatively tasty. Improve learning, behavior, physical and mental health (diminishing future drug use) and probably give the ole IQ a little bump.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Reps should occasionally favor some stuff like this to back up their talk of compassionate conservatism or what have you. It would almost certainly save us money in the long run.

Not as satisfying as coercing some wretch, who lacks the money or wherewithal to see Dr. Feelgood like a good suburbanite, into a drug test?

This is about people taking advantage of tax payers. Start there: fraud.

[LVH2]

...

You are running wild with sensationalist ...

real people taking money from other real people at gunpoint, and giving it to other people who then use it to buy drugs.

I've got worse news for you. Someone out there is using welfare money to buy child porn. Others are doing the same with their salary as LEOs or teachers. Some are sending it to terrorist organizations, or any other bad thing you can think of. All of that money was taken from you at gunpoint too, if the welfare money was.

I don't think my questions were sensationalist at all. They weren't intended that way, in any case. They were intended to ramp down the sensationalism about drug use by comparing it to other vices, and the many other people who use chemical crutches, many of whom recieve some sort of government aid or another.

What is sensationalist about asking if moderate pot use is worse than spending 30 hours a week online, or a middle class person who gets tax breaks spending it with doctor feelgood?

Secondarily, if the aim is to promote healthier living among the poor, there are non-harmful, more effective things we can do that will save us money in the long run, while this program costs us money. One obvious example is going balls out to promote healthy diets, especially with kids.

Why is it so much more appealing to force somebody who was raised in foster care, has mental health issues and is barely hanging on to pee in a cup, so you can punish him if he self-medicates?