Thread: UA for Public Assistance?

The governor of Florida recently signed an executive order requiring all recipients of public assistance (i.e. food stamps, welfare, WIC, etc.) to submit to random drug testing. Apparently if they tank the drug test the gravy train will quit running. I like the idea, I mean, it hardly seems fair for hardworking taxpayers to subsidize somebody's drug addiction. What do you think?
Florida Gov. Rick Scott signs law requiring welfare recipients to take drug test, ACLU objects

Of course the ACLU is lawyering up even as we speak. I must have missed that in my several readings of the U.S. Constitution. That part where the rest of us are obligated to pay for a crackhead's groceries so he'll have more money to buy crack. It's also no secret that welfare benefit cards are also widely exchanged for drugs.

It sounds reasonable to me. I'd also appreciate it if the food stamp program was run more like the WIC program, in which the aid recipient is limited to FOOD that has a decent nutritional value. I'm disgusted at the extent of JUNK calories (not food) purchased by food stamp card holders. Chips, cookies, and soda should not be provided by the government. It just increases the health care costs that we are also forced to provide for so many leaches.

I can only dream for such a thing here in the People's Republic of California.

I think I cannot wait for the next election so I can vote against the 'new' governor. His popularity, or the lack of it , is at about 29% last I heard. He is making a bad situation in this state worse as far as the economy goes. Interesting that he is worried about welfare recipients ...... when he was a CEO for a company that was fined 600 million $ for bilking Medicaid out of even more. Here is an interesting article.

I really hope the ALCU loses this suit. I saw it yesterday and was pretty stoked but it I think it was Minnesota (or maybe Michigan, one of them "M" states) that had something like this a year or three back and the ACLU won that . I'd also like for SNAP/EBT cards to be only good at the grocery store/farmer's market. Our local farm market actually offers $20 worth of veggies for $10 worth of food stamps to benefit eligible folks.
However, one of the gas station chains (Sheetz, to be specific for you folks in the mid-atlantic) accepts them for food. Not totally sure but they seem to have figured out a way to get around things so now you have people spending $5 on a sandwich that they could have bought a whole loaf of bread and jars of PB&J with... annoys me greatly.

I agree to a point, and I can see why he wants this policy in place to stop the spongers but let's examine a little scenario.

You've worked hard your whole life and eventually the firm you work at goes under and you're out of a job. You're scared about the future, worried about how you'll support your family and where the next paycheck will come from.

To tide you over you sign on to welfare. At the welfare office some low paid worker chucks a cup at you and tells you to go fill it, probably enjoying exercising the little bit of power they have. How does that make you feel? It kinda makes a bad situation worse doesn't it? Kicking someone when they're down?

Does treating everyone who signs onto welfare as a criminal junkie heap more pressure and stress on something that's already has plenty of stigma attached?

I agree with the policy on a cerebral level, stopping the spongers, but it totally removes the caring element.

Besides which, how many people on welfare do you think have a hard core drug habit? Id guess less than 5%, so how is it fair to hammer the other 95% of people who aren't druggies? What about those who don't take drugs but have simply decided it's easier to mooch than get a job? No test for that!

Don't get me wrong, I'm no bleeding heart liberal, but there has to be a better way to control welfare than this.

Originally Posted by 1OldGI

It's also no secret that welfare benefit cards are also widely exchanged for drugs.

I don't know how much people on walfare in your contry get, but up here in Canada there's no way it could pay for drugs. And I'd be very surprised a drug pusher would accept a bunch of complicated benefit cards when he can get easy cash simpler & easier from any other addict.

Originally Posted by Glenn24

I don't know how much people on walfare in your contry get, but up here in Canada there's no way it could pay for drugs. And I'd be very surprised a drug pusher would accept a bunch of complicated benefit cards when he can get easy cash simpler & easier from any other addict.

Here in VA you can get from $18-$115 a month. Back when I used to partake of the green stuff I could pick up 1/8thoz of it for 5-20 depending on quality and what kind of quantities it was bought in. If one was to buy an oz of the cheap to mid grade stuff it could usually be had for 50-70 and that will last most people a little while. Meth can be had for about the same price and the people that use meth aren't usually too interested in food... Not to mention that down here you get a debit card and just punch in a PIN number to use it so anyone can have access to it and what you can buy is pretty open (no booze, tobacco, meds, or stuff prepared in store)

Originally Posted by bharner

Here in VA you can get from $18-$115 a month. Back when I used to partake of the green stuff I could pick up 1/8thoz of it for 5-20 depending on quality and what kind of quantities it was bought in. If one was to buy an oz of the cheap to mid grade stuff it could usually be had for 50-70 and that will last most people a little while. Meth can be had for about the same price and the people that use meth aren't usually too interested in food... Not to mention that down here you get a debit card and just punch in a PIN number to use it so anyone can have access to it and what you can buy is pretty open (no booze, tobacco, meds, or stuff prepared in store)

Except that those that qualify for the $18-$115 a month may also qualify for
a much longer list of pay outs. Folk that know how to work social services
can build an astounding list. Single men ... not so long, mothers and children
oh my. Each of city, county, state, federal has numerous service groups...

Consider coyote hunting years ago. As pests each county had a bounty,
one county paid for the left ear, another for the nose. Mink farmers
would buy the meat, the fur pelt would be bought by someone else. Those of
us that had a reason to be out in the desert in the winter could
knock a couple down toss them in the back of the pickup to freeze solid
on the way home. Depending on the quality of the pelt the "skinner"
would buy them out of the back of the truck and pay cash. He would do all
the hard work of skinning and butchering and also collect the bounty(s).
The sum of all these pieces made for a tidy sum...

So why not impose a drugs test for being a person in any capacity whatever? Why not try and punish everyone who provides this certain evidence of being a drug user? This is not just a vague, uncertain way of tackling the pettiest end of the drug problem: the drug addict who will sponge off himself by buying small quantities of drugs with his food entitlement. It is about winning political sympathy from others.

Many would consider it practically treasonable for welfare recipients to turn down a chance of becoming really rich, merely because it risked the waste of several uncomfortable years. With a difference in the sort of enterprise - difference which may not mean much to them - some do just that. My own opinion is that as long as customers will pay enough to make it worth a dealer's or courier's while to take a great risk of being caught, the war on drugs is lost. Legalising and regulating the inexpensive supply of unadulterated drugs of predictable strength would avoid much of the drug-induced death and property crime, and virtually all of the gangland murders. It worked with the Volstead Act.

That is just opinion, but I saw quoted, above, the words Hemingway lifted and added to, from the seventeenth-century Graham of Claverhouse, persecutor of the Covenanters: "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those that have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never care for anything else thereafter." The amount "wasted" on misused food stamps (though food presumably ends up grown, sold and eaten, by people who are unlikely to be rich) is a drop in the ocean compared with that spent on giving the drug enforcement organisations their fix on the above.

The usual thing in developed nations is for the unemployed poor to receive rather more than they do in the US, for them to receive it in money rather than anything as freaky and stigmatising as food stamps or cards, and for a more sympathetic line to be taken by the employed and successful. Or should that be the unemployed or successful? For am I not right in thinking that plenty of more than 40 million Americans who receive it are doing socially useful, demanding jobs? Of course other nations experience abuses, but it isn't as if they don't get anything worth having in exchange. It reduces the feeling that those at different levels in the social pyramid are different species, entitled to prey one upon another.

This issue is about the political capital to be gained by persecuting two widely resented targets: drug users and welfare recipients, whether it has any beneficial effect or not. Of course someone of a different political complexion may have to look for his political capital elsewhere, by doing the same to a different target group. But if it were about the prevention of crime, I know a particularly revolting form of crime, committed by a few, which could be prevented by depriving the innocent of a right which nobody desperately needs. Make everyone use cartridge razors.