States Adding Drug Test as Hurdle for Welfare - NYTimes.com →
As more Americans turn to government programs for refuge from a merciless economy, a growing number are encountering a new price of admission to the social safety net: a urine sample.
Policy makers in three dozen states this year proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing. Such laws, which proponents say ensure that tax dollars are not being misused and critics say reinforce stereotypes about the poor, have passed in states including Arizona, Indiana and Missouri.It really is about reinforcing the stigma. Nobody is proposing a drug test for, say, Medicare. Or a drug test for claiming a mortgage interest deduction. If anybody did, we’d see outrage about how intrusive it was.
Regrettably, we treat our low-income neighbors as if they live at our sufferance. We want them to be destitute and on their best behavior.^^ So true. The notion that poor people should be suffering saints infuriates me.
didn’t Florida already do this & end up spending way more than they “saved”?
Learn from the mistakes of others, fools!
^^ They did. But I am starting to believe that’s really not what it’s about, saving money and all that jazz. Even if it’s losing money, I feel like these people are trying to suck all the money to a few key places (more than they already have) and want to make it hard to get any kind of assistance ever while making it more and more unbearable to live. They don’t give two shits about the mistakes of others and I’d bet they are well aware of them yet still want to go through with this.
And in Florida the politician that pushed it thru, his wife was a bigwig 4the drug testing company. So no, it wasn’t about saving money. It was about making more money for greedy people and using folks bias against ppl on welfare to get it.
(Source: abbyjean)
