Albers isn’t alone in his thinking. Nationally, a new strategy has crystalized among Tea Party conservatives who wish to turn the recession into a culture war. In a growing number of states, politicians have sought to undermine the economic safety net by suggesting, in the form of law, that irresponsible behavior rather than a busted, unequal economy has kept poor families struggling. The building meme has made it to the top of Republican ranks as well. “It’s a great idea,” Mitt Romney said of the Georgia bill at a February campaign stop. “People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they are not using the money for drugs.”

As Romney implied, the strategy is not limited to cash assistance, which is an already stigmatized and atrophied program. The drug-user canard has now shown up in debates over nearly every economic safety net program. In December, congressional Republicans pushed a bill that would have required all applicants to the unemployment insurance program submit to a drug test. That bill did not become law, but a watered down version did. 

There are currently nearly 30 states with bills in play that would implement drug testing requirements on applicants to some combination of cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and job training programs. It seems everyone wants a piece of the action.

[…]

It’s notable that half of the states that have considered drug testing cash assistance applicants in the past year weighed legislation that would almost surely fail a legal challenge. It’s also notable that data shows drug testing to be wasteful. In Florida, nearly 98 percent of applicants passed the tests that Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in June 2011. But constitutionality and efficacy aren’t relevant. The point is to stigmatize poor people and, thus, provide political cover for safety net cutting in a time when millions of Americans need it more than ever.  

Like many conservative legislative movements, drug testing poor people isn’t an idea that’s spreading through happenstance. According to interviews with Republican state legislators in several states, these bills are moving through familiar and well-trod pathways connecting conservative think tanks and state legislators scattered around the country. The legislation has made its way from state to state in the briefcases of anti-government ideologues who’ve spent their whole careers decimating the safety net—often using racially loaded attacks on the poor.

[…]

But the precise form that drug testing takes in these states is immaterial because testing unemployed people is not the ultimate goal. As lawmakers learned well during welfare reform, the best way to demolish a poverty program is to first decimate the public image of those who receive it. From the early 1980s forward, the welfare queen narrative prevailed and, by the mid 1990s, tearing down the system that propped these women up became the only logical end. After Congress devolved the welfare program, states shrunk their cash assistance roles to fractions of their previous size. Now, in the recession, one in four low-income single mothers—or 4 million women in all—are without a job or cash assistance.

[…]

As things stand, safety net programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance and unemployment benefits are popular and widely used, which means that tearing them down as Romney is ready to do will take some work. But that work is well underway. 

“It’s clear it’s a way to weaken the social safety net in general in whatever way they can,” says Yolande Cadore, of the Drug Policy Alliance, an advocacy group that opposes the drug testing bills. “By casting unemployed and poor people this way, it helps tear down these programs.”

So conservative state lawmakers are moving forward with their attempts to cement the link between drug use and poverty. And though many of the most expansive bills are likely to fail in court—the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights has already said they’ll file suit against Georgia—the point may ultimately not be about winning the right to drug test poor and unemployed people. Rather, the goal is to convince Americans that the poor and unemployed don’t really need help, that their circumstances are of their own making.

 (via Why Tea Party Lawmakers Are Trying to Conflate Poverty and Drug Addiction - COLORLINES)

newsworks:

Host of WHYY’s Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane, is participating in a $5-a-day food stamp challenge.

“Here is what I purchased for my food stamp allotment for the week. I spent $32, and my best find was six peppers for $2. I had to buy instant coffee and already miss my freshly brewed cup of joe. I cooked up a big pot of lentil soup yesterday, which I hope will last for much of the week. While I’m a cost-conscious shopper, I have rarely been so careful and concerned about what things cost.”

—Marty Moss-Coane

Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has signed legislation that would require thousands of people applying for welfare to pass a drug test before they could receive benefits.

The Republican-controlled Legislature passed the law over the opposition of Democrats. Backers say it will ensure that welfare benefits are used for their intended purpose and not to subsidize drug use and criminal activity. Democrats said the measure places an unfair burden on the poor.

Gerry Weber of the Southern Center for Human Rights said the organization is prepared to file a lawsuit over the issue, but not until it is put into practice. It takes effect July 1.

A similar law in Florida took effect last July but was blocked in October by a federal judge, who cited constitutional concerns.

At least two dozen states have proposed measures this year that would require drug tests for benefits.

Cruel and insane.  Guess these states feel like they have money to burn in fighting the lawsuits.

The Oklahoma House has approved a bill to require drug testing for certain welfare recipients, but not before it was amended to include testing for those seeking elected office.

The full House voted 82-6 on Monday for the amended bill. It now heads to the Senate for consideration.

Oklahoma City Republican Rep. Guy Liebmann says those receiving Temporary Benefits for Needy Families would pay for the test and then be reimbursed if they test negative. Under the bill, children whose parents fail a test would be able to receive benefits through another family member.

Democratic Rep. Mike Shelton of Oklahoma City successfully amended the bill to require candidates for state and local offices to be tested for illegal drugs before filing for office.

Other programs, like Medicare, are provided by the government, but eligibility is mostly automatic, and recipients have paid into them. Beneficiaries of such programs are somewhat less likely to realize they’re on a government dole than beneficiaries of means-tested programs.

Then there’s what Mettler calls “the submerged state.” These policies are mostly, though not exclusively, tax breaks. They include the much-beloved home-mortgage interest deduction and the tax exclusion for employer-provided health care. Recipients of these policies — and there are tens of millions of them — are rarely cognizant that they’re benefiting from a government program.

But they are. “Indirect social policies offer benefits that are comparable to direct social benefits both in their purposes and in their costs,” Mettler and Koch write. “Both are targeted to specific groups of people, aimed to reward some kind of activity or some class of persons whom policymakers deem worthy of public support. From an accounting perspective, as well, both types have the same effect: They impose costs on the federal budget, whether incurred through fiscal obligations or lost revenues.”

The costs are significant. Huge, in fact. Tax expenditures now cost the federal government $1 trillion annually — more than Medicare and Medicaid combined. And they’re regressive.

There is also a pattern to these programs: The more a government social program benefits wealthier Americans, the less obtrusive it is. We design policies for the poor in ways that make it hard to escape the knowledge that the government is providing help. But richer Americans rely on programs that are “submerged.”

5. Santorum: “I’m for income inequality.” College could have taught him that too much income inequality has negative effects on a country, as is held by Fed chief Ben Bernanke, who has a college degree in … economics. In nations with high levels of inequality, periods of economic expansion are shortened to a third as long. And, persistent inequality that is felt to be unfair contributes to high degrees of social conflict.

4. Evolution isn’t “just a theory,” as Santorum has put it in his quest to have the pseudo-science of Creationism taught in biology classes. In science, a “theory” is a robust explanation for observed phenomena that accounts for all the known facts about them. So, physicists speak of the theory of gravity. It isn’t that they think gravity isn’t a fact, or that they entertain other explanations of why books always fall if you let them go in mid-air (for instance, that each book has an invisible elf on it who likes a giddy ride down to the floor and guides it that way). Likewise, biological evolution is one of the more solidly proved things in science, and has been repeatedly observed in nature. Whether a divine power has set the universe up in this way, so that evolution occurs, is a theological question for seminaries, not a question for high school biology classes. Only someone insecure in their faith would need to bolster it by attempting to insert it into non-theological realms like science.

3. Santorum, when asked about welfare in Iowa, said that he doesn’t want to make the lives of blacks better by giving them other people’s money. Some 84% of food stamp recipients in Iowa are white. A social historian of the United States with a college degree in history could have told him that welfare programs were created for whites and for a long time African Americans were not even eligible for them. They aren’t about race, but about providing a social safety net so that the needy don’t starve to death on our doorsteps. Moreover, most of the “needy” are only temporarily so, with people falling into the category (especially when they are young) and climbing back out.

2. Santorum maintains that Usamah Ben Laden was tracked because the US tortured al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Actually, Usamah was found by tracking his courier. But torture or “enhanced interrogation” is notoriously unreliable. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi under torture told the US government that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had trained al-Qaeda agents in chemical weaponry– a complete falsehood, which Dick Cheney and Condi Rice quoted in support of going to war with Iraq. Someone educated in a Security Studies Program could have given Santorum better information than his own little brain has been able to come up with. Santorum, notoriously, tried to instruct Senator John McCain in how torture works; McCain was tortured by the North Vietnamese while in custody there.

1. Santorum maintains that there is no such thing as a genuine liberal Christian because, he says, the plain text of the Bible is contrary to the principles of liberalism. He goes on to conflate liberalism with “liberation theology” (they are not the same thing). But the American Roman Catholic bishops of Santorum’s own church often take social positions that are recognizably liberal, basing them in scripture and in papal encyclicals. When it comes to feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, visiting prisoners, and doing to others as you would have them do to you, it is actually Ayn Rand style conservatism that is incompatible with Christianity. Santorum’s Bible appears to be missing the Beatitudes, and his Catholic education seems so defective that he is unaware of “Evangelium Vitae” (1995), which forbids the capital punishment that Santorum favors, or “Laborum exercens” (1981), which recognizes the right of workers to unionize, or “Caritas in Veritatae” (2009), in which Pope Benedict says, “Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.” Sounds like welfare to me. Someone who studied religion in college might have been able to help Santorum avoid all these errors.

A reporter at Atlanta NBC affiliate 11 Alive braved the onslaught of Mitt’s in-your-face agreeability:

Hullinger: “How about a quick question [on] the state legislature. It’s been bantered about-that welfare recipients should be drug tested. What do you think?”

Romney: “states will deal with drug testing with welfare recipients, but my own view it’s a great idea. People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they are not using the money for drugs. I think it’s an excellent idea.”

This is insane…

The state is reaching back more than a quarter of a century to collect millions in nonfraudulent overpayments to former welfare recipients, most the result of administrative errors by government workers.

The state Department of Job and Family Services said an estimated 14,000 notices have been sent in an effort to collect about $18 million in welfare overpayments from before 2001.

An estimated 8,000 Ohioans owe an additional $8.4 million in food-stamp overpayments that are more than 10 years old.

truthdogg:

Dear Uncle Lou,

That receipt reminds me of Reagan’s old speeches about “young bucks,” But then again I guess it’s supposed to.

(I wonder why they wrote a D in front of EBT. Makes it sort of not make sense.)   Here’s another receipt you might appreciate on a different level; check out that tip.

After you look at this one, that $140 doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Cheaper than a few bottles of water!

—Your nephew

Fw: Receipt Found in a Parking Lot

Read More

One of my favorite movie scenes posted in honor of this…

Victory in Florida: No Illegal Drug Testing For Welfare

On Monday we got some great news in Florida: following an ACLU lawsuit, the state will no longer be allowed to make people applying for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) take a drug test in order to get the assistance they need.

Preliminary figures on a new Florida law requiring drug tests for welfare applicants show that they are less likely than other people to use drugs, not more. One famous Floridian suggests that it’s the people who came up with the law who should be submitting specimens. Columnist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen offered to pay for drug testing for all 160 members of the Florida Legislature in what he called “a patriotic whiz-fest.”

Columnist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen offered to pay for drug testing for all 160 members of the Florida Legislature in what he called “a patriotic whiz-fest.” Several of the law’s supporters say they’re on board.

“There is a certain public interest in going after hypocrisy,” Hiaasen said Tuesday, two days after he made his proposal in a Miami Herald column.

“Folks that are applying for DCF (Department of Children and Families) money normally wouldn’t be standing in that line, and on top of that humiliation they now get to pee in a cup so they can get grocery money for their kids,” Hiaasen told the Associated Press in an interview.

abaldwin360:

letterstomycountry:

jakke:

walex:

jakke:

drunkchicksandbigdicks:

mrschaeos:

This I why there needs to be more restriction with government help. These people bought steak lobster ad soda and food stamps covered it wtf. Eat better then I do and my money is earned.

I know what you’re saying but at the same time I cannot stop fucking laughing.

Seriously, there are tears.

Dear God.

Okay honestly I cannot believe this is on my dashboard. Seriously now?

Firstly: Americans, if you could sashay off to the grocery store and purchase half a dozen lobsters, two steaks, and 120 cans of Mountain Dew on food stamps on a weekly basis, why isn’t everyone doing it? Like, why is anyone bothering to apply for jobs that raise them above the poverty line, if this is what living in poverty is like?

Also, this receipt shows total spending of $141.78. Seeing as the average food stamp recipient is getting $133.12 per month in food stamps, and seeing as the average food stamp recipient isn’t a boa constrictor that eats once a month then lies in the sun quietly digesting, this is pretty clearly more than one would ever spend on food stamps in one sitting. 

We’re not even going to get into what kind of inexplicable circumstances would lead to some angry Internet libertarian getting access to this perfectly-preserved receipt and then scanning and uploading it. What, did you steal their wallet or something?

In conclusion: this is clearly bullshit, and I am not in a bullshit type mood right now. If this was meant as a joke, sorry for the rant, but it seems like people actually thing this is legitimate. Which is fucking ridiculous.

A little Snope-ing does a body good.

The man responsible for this egregious bill was found guilty of Food Stamp Trafficking.

So, you know, they do actually police this sort of thing.

Wow, okay. Looks like this guy’s getting smacked down hard, which is greatly heartening.

The same applies to welfare fraud.  People are found guilty of it all the time.  The perception that these systems are abused willy-nilly with little oversight is rather inaccurate.

I’m glad someone got to this and put up the snopes link.

I’m so sick and fucking tired of the welfare queen bullshit. It’s like so many people are afraid someone’s getting something for nothing.

FUCK. My family was on food stamps when I was growing up, we got government cheese too, and because of being on assistance my mother was able to complete school and get a job as a nurse.

I’m so sick and fucking tired of people acting like everyone on assistance is some kind of mooch. Shit happens, people fall on hard times. I’m glad there are safety nets in place.

Aside from the fraud documented above with the Snopes link - even a family dependent upon food stamps might skimp and eat beans and cornbread for a month in order to give one of the family members - or the entire family a super-duper special meal treat to celebrate some wonderful life event - from a birthday to a graduation to who knows what? 

I do that all the time.  Frugal most all the time so I can occasionally really blow out on a favorite - like lobster.  Maybe only a couple of times in a good year, but when I am eating that lobster, it is well worth all the peanut butter sandwiches I ate in order to afford it.

So long as we are not living in the same house, it would be impossible to make any kind of fair judgment about what anyone is spending at a store or restaurant on any single occasion.