According to Policy.Mic, a site which monitors policies and their misadventures, drug testing of welfare recipients has been nothing less than a travesty:
• Arizona tested 87,000 plus welfare recipients and caught one drug user initially. 42 took follow up tests, and 16 were caught. 23 recipients were denied benefits because they didn’t take the tests.
• Tennessee tested 16,017 recipients and caught 37.
• In Kansas, welfare recipients are to be banned from taking more than $25 at a time from ATMs, increasing their bank service fees. The new law also prevents spending on alcohol, tobacco, sexually oriented materials, movies, etc.
“Land of the Free” and no big government interference, eh?
These figures don’t need explaining. The costs of the testing aren’t being mentioned in the media, but you can assume that they’re a lot more than the net value of the welfare paid to recipients. In effect, the hate campaign against welfare recipients has been yet another expensive, unproductive political stunt.
The conservative hate campaign against the poor
The anti welfare recipients campaign is a sort of gimme for rich politicians. It’s also a model of ignorance:
“Taxpayer funding of drug use” is the catchcry, but doesn’t have a lot to do with the actual funding. Americans, unlike just about everyone else in the Western world, pay for their unemployment insurance, for example.
Welfare rules are so screwed up that in New York welfare recipients are heavily penalized for getting any part-time work. If they get these jobs, they actually lose more than they make.
Welfare administration is chaotic. I spent several years working on a site where American welfare recipients were constantly complaining about simply complying with welfare rules.
Welfare payments go straight to paying bills and rent, in most cases. Anyone who knows the relationship between welfare payments, staying alive, and drug prices could tell you that you really need a job to be able to afford any significant amount of drugs.
Conservative politicians around the world have made careers out of hating the poor. What’s really odd about this situation is the arithmetic — while pandering to the 1 percent, politicians get elected by the 99 percent. In the same way that Donald Trump antagonizes a huge section of the population to get attention, most conservative politicians seem quite content to annoy a vast part of the electorate to get pats on the head from their owners.
The sheer gutlessness of the very rich and their duly elected sycophants doing everything they can to make poverty that much worse for the poor would have been astonishing in the past. Even Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan didn’t alienate the poor. (Margaret Thatcher made a point of it, but that was in the UK, where class pretensions were a traditional selling point.)
Now the routine attacks on the poor are normal. Don’t give me that crap about the hard-working taxpayer. The average taxpayer avoids taxes wherever they can, and the very rich barely pay any taxes at all. Politicians and political stooges wouldn’t know what hard work was if it got them pregnant.
There’s not an atom of truth in the conservative ethos of hatred of the poor and never has been. It’s a myth which only survives on ignorance and a pathetic middle class peasant desire to be better than someone or something, even fictitiously.
These are the same bastards who fight the wrong wars and let their servicepeople rot in poverty and PTSD on the streets afterwards. These are the people who allow Wall Street banks to break every law they can.
For the record — I come from a real conservative background that makes these guys and their pretensions to upper class status look like un-cleaned public toilets. I’ve met at least one real American Southern conservative who could buy and sell most of the U.S. conservative party members with their family name alone.
What we call trash are people like these, who’ve never done a damn thing in their lives except do everything they can to make life a misery for the poor.
Being poor doesn’t make you trash; it’s who you are and what you are that makes you trash.
