CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Urinalysis on Welfare Recipients is Fair Because Poor People Are All On Drugs!

Monday, February 06, 2012

this entry brought to you by gillian welch, "the way the whole thing ends"





Yeah! If I haveta then they haveta! People shouldn't just get free shit! Peeing in a cup is the least they can do, right? This is America! Don't tread on me! Life liberty and other shit! Out of my cold dead hands!

Except:

1) Let's ignore the obvious 4th Amendment Violations-- you can't just search and seize people's pee just because of a pretty gross stereotype. Ya know. Poor people smoke crack. And when I say "Poor people", we all know this actually means black people. Our first black President is our first welfare President. Remember? So now we all know this is just code for racism, right? Okay. Let's move on now that we're all on the same page.

But what if you totally didn't notice the racism? This sounds perfectly reasonable! If honest, hard working Americans have to take a drug test to earn a paycheck, then people who get free money should have to as well, right? What's good for the goose is good for the gander, right? Never mind the amount of people you personally know at your workplace who are on drugs and somehow didn't get caught by the drug testing policy, at least those people have jobs and are hard working citizens, right? Riiight?

2) The thing is, drug tests aren't free. In reality, the company you work for hates giving drug tests. Believe me, if drug tests were free, they'd give them constantly. Daily. What would be the down side? Except they're not free. They have to pay a private company to do it, and that drug company will charge between 25 and 75 dollars a pop. Companies hate this. Especially minimum wage companies. Some companies with high turn over don't even bother, because paying 25 dollars for a person who doesn't even show up the next day is not worth it.

So it's not like a company is just going to take on testing the urine of the entire welfare population in a state just out of the kindness of their heart. In fact, in order to take on that kind of burst in demand, they're going to have to hire new people to test all that urine-- meaning they'll have to charge the state more than they would a company which only sends urine whenever they hire someone. If the state didn't make it worth their while why would they do it?

So guess who pays for all this? You do. Just because you have this bizarre assumption that people on welfare can be just assumed to use drugs because that's what poor people do. They don't even have jobs! What else would they be doing during all that time?

You know how Republicans are always complaining about Democrats and their overreach of government? And how one day we'll wake up, when Democrats are in charge, and they'll have a hand in every part of your life? Well now those very people terrified of government overreach and bureaucracy are demanding a bureaucrat takes your neighbor's pee because, you know, every time you see a drug user, they're poor. But rich kids and business frat dudes on wall street blowing through the night partying on 75-dollars-a-line coke, those people may be on drugs, but at least they're productive members of society!

But there's also the problem of:

3) This is not how food stamps work. Food stamps come on a card, and not every store accepts them. There's a special function on a store's cash register that says "EBT", and not all stores have that function-- that's why you can't go into, say, Macy's and use your food stamps. And furthermore, if you are in a store that accepts EBT, when you try to buy things like beer, liquor, or even toilet paper or diapers, it doesn't let you use it.

I don't know what sort of drug dealer will, in lieu of cash, let you buy a few rocks of crack in exchange for 75 dollars worth of milk, baby food, and store brand canned corn.

It is true that there are other forms of government welfare that don't involve food stamps, including unemployment. This is a benefit given to you when you had a job and were a productive member of society and then you lost that job. So when you were hired you took that drug test, passed, and then you lost that job by termination that was wasn't voluntary. Most people, when they are terminated involuntarily, didn't do it just for a way to do drugs-- if they wanted to do drugs, they'd do it while they still had a steady income coming in in which to pay for drugs, not take a pay cut with a finite cut off date just to do drugs, because once that unemployment runs out, well, they'll have to get a new job. Even brain dead drug users realize not doing drugs long enough to pass a drug test at an interview, stay on the payroll long enough to qualify for unemployment, then doing such poor quality work as to be fired, then blowing unemployment checks on drugs until it runs out and getting another job is a poor plan when they could just do drugs all day long, do exactly enough work to never get fired, and continue doing drugs while getting a full pay check and benefits.

And all this ignores the fact that most states require people of welfare benefits to show some sort of proof of searching for employment to get those benefits, otherwise they must be deemed unfit to work to continue getting them. You know those disabled and elderly. Always chasing the horse.

The thing is, the argument of "If I gotta take a drug test, they should too!" totally makes sense at first blush. You know. If you're the self righteous person who whines "BUT IT'S NOT FAIR!" when you see that your neighbor got some food on their plate too, even if the plate is visibly less full than yours and the quality of the food is much worse. But the second you look beyond the first layer it makes no sense, and the only way you could possibly support it is if you are willing to admit, out loud, that you think poor people are lower than you and you can make any sorts of assumption you want about them, no matter how insidious, without any proof. The burden of proof, after all, that they're not doing wasteful things with your tax dollars is on them.
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with love from CRS @ 9:52 AM 

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