LIBERTY & TRENDING TOPICS: "Want that check? Pee in this cup."

"Want that welfare? Pee in this cup."

Seems to make enough sense to me. More than once, I've shared some meme floating about social media that argues the following: if I have to pee in a cup to get my job, welfare recipients should have to pee in a cup to get their welfare check... especially seeing as it's coming out of my pocket.

This arising from concern that, you know, there are bound to be recipients of welfare benefits who squander the money confiscated from the pockets of everyday hardworking red-blooded Americans, for drugs, booze, or whatever else for which they're not supposed to be using our hard-earned dollars that are handed over to them by Big Brother.

For me, it wasn't entirely about cutting tax budgets. One flaming liberal acquaintance of mine once commented, "If you want to cut a budget, let's make politicians volunteers [instead of paid employees]. Another commented, "I think we should drug test all CEO's who are getting all this corporate welfare."

Commondreams.org and WhiteHouse.gov allegedly cite a tax breakdown where, for the individual earning $50,000 annually, the amount for SNAP (food stamps) is $36.82 annually, and $6.96 annually for welfare, while the amount paid in tax for national defense is roughly $248 and $4,000 - four thousand bucks - in corporate subsidies.

To which I would reply, "Yes, corporate subsidies are a problem, the corporate welfare is a problem, I've heard it referred-to as upside-down-Socialism (where the rich benefit). yada yada yada ... But it's the principle of the thing."

This is what I meant when I said it's not about seeking a means to bringing down taxes paid; but rather, on principle, a matter of saying, 'Hey, if I have to work for my money and I have to pass drug testing to work, then you should have to pass it to be the individual recipient of my money.' As though it's somehow different when you're talking about taking-on big corporations to whom your tax money is paid-out in subsidies, versus taking-on the image in one's mind of the "usual welfare recipient" - you know, maybe you envision someone of a minority class in your mind, with a baby on their hip, probably an unwed mother, except that she's somehow driving a nicer car than you, Mister hard-working red-blooded all-American man, and maybe she's sitting in front of a 60-inch TV theater system, collecting her welfare 'cuz she's too lazy to go out and get herself a job.

Yes - the principle of the matter.

Well, someone brought to my attention the following: apparently, Arizona agreed with me in some regard, and decided to give the trust pee test idea a shot...

...allegedly spending $60 for testing for each of 87,000 different individuals. So - total spent on drug tests: $5,220,000.

And, as many suspected, they allegedly found one individual who didn't pass the test.

Just one.

The great state saved $560 by cutting that citizen's benefits.

According to http://www.aol.com/article/2015/07/24/welfare-recipient-drug-testing-brings-shocking-results/21212782/ : "The implementation of the process [ultimately] cost Arizona taxpayers millions of dollars."

Accordingly, the following:

"The Arizona Department of Economic Security told the Arizona Sonora News Service earlier this year that over the course of more than five years, "42 people have been asked to take a follow-up drug test and 19 actually took the test, 16 of whom passed. The other 23 were stripped of their benefits for failing to take the drug test. In total, three welfare recipients failed their tests in five years. When the program was initially implemented, state officials promised $1.7 million in savings."

I find that hard to believe, but perhaps within the realm of possibility. The numbers must be skewed somewhere, and to be entirely truthful with all of you, I'm too lazy to take the time and energy to look into the calculations and statistics, nor do I even know what's available, nor am I any sort of professional researcher.

But...

Maine did it too. And so did six other states.

Per http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/maines-welfare-drug-tests_55ce1b56e4b0ab468d9d266f :

"Early results are in for a new welfare drug testing regime in Maine: They caught the guy.

From April through June, the state only attempted to screen 15 out of about 5,700 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients, according to an Associated Press investigation published Thursday, and just one person tested positive.

 

"One single cup of dirty urine out of a pool of thousands of recipients might seem surprisingly low, but it's actually typical. Welfare drug testing schemes never catch a significant number of drug users.

"These results from Maine confirm that drug testing is far more effective at acting as a barrier to benefit receipt than at identifying people who are abusing drugs," Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a welfare policy expert with the Washington-based Center for Law and Social Policy, told The Huffington Post.    

"Earlier this year, ThinkProgress reviewed welfare drug testing schemes in the seven states that had them in place at the time, and all but one yielded positive rates of less than 1 percent. Apparently, people on welfare aren't getting high nearly as much as everyone else is: National drug use surveys find that about 8 or 9 percent of the general population says it has used drugs in the past month."

So...

About the principle of the matter... to which I referred earlier...

These statistics and results may not sway drug testing on principle, but they sure do sway my opinion away from implementing testing due to the TAXPAYER COST.

At the end of the day, money talks. Am I right?

||JDS||

PS - I wanna hear from you. Yes, you, the readers. Feel free.

#welfare #drugtesting #druguse #taxpayers #taxdollarsatwork