96% of Florida welfare cash recipients pass drug tests.Follow

/shrug

Maybe the fact that he's smoking pot every night is why he's managed to end out as the sole income provider for a family of four, and is somehow still working 50 hours a week in a minimum wage job. Even right now, with jobs quite scarce, you pretty much have to be a complete ***** up (or a young student) to not be able to land some kind of job that pays more than minimum wage (and likely a few dollars an hour more). That's not to say that there aren't some people out there trying really hard to get ahead, but who just can't get a good job with sufficient pay and hours to get by, but I don't see how smoking pot every night is helping them either.

I lived in the poor part of town making 50k a year it had the cheapest rent. The poor part of town might not had been that poor 20 years ago. You do know some people do like to stay in their family home or move back to it. Not every "poor part of town" in every city is raging with drive bys and crack dealers on every corner or welfare.

Though now I'm on SSDI been on it since 2008(26 at the time) cause I thought it was a simple chest cold and didn't take a day off to see a doctor, boy did I pay for that. One LAVD and a new heart latter. Why did I bring this up its simple you might be young healthy today but sometimes Life steps in and screws you out the blue. I was even in the heart ward with a young mother who had a planned pregnancy that damaged her heart so much she was on the list with me. So think about that the shoe can be switched around on you over night.

In my org. we have 5 guys that are licensed tankermen. They have to have the license (issued by the USCG) to operate big oil collection barges we own. For the license to be current they have to be drug tested initially (they also can't be color-blind) and then remain in a quarterly, random drug testing pool. They each seem to come up for testing once or twice a year.

Our testing is mandated by USCG but they defer to the rules and regs of the federal DOT program.

ITT: 100% of welfare applicants want to use drugs and require a nudge in the opposite direction. Every. Single. One.

That 4% aren't going to be able to quit on a dime, addiction doesn't work that way, they are going to have to turn to crime to survive, which will put them in prison after a government paid public defender handles their court case. Prisons and the justice system cost a heck of a lot more than welfare. There is nothing of value in drug testing welfare applicants. You want people off of welfare you make welfare just barely enough to survive on and provide job training programs, interview clothing etc to get them back on their feet.

did they test for jenkem?

I understand where gbaji is coming from (I think I do anyway) and I'm not in disagreement.

That's not to say I'm for testing given the criteria he's outlined, but I'm certainly not against it.

I certainly would find this whole thing much more reasonable if it were for unemployment insurance, but food? That is just too far for me. Why not bar medicare/medicaid for smokers? That could actually result in decent cost savings.

/whoosh

We don't know how many people within that group may use or want to use drugs. Nor can we know which individuals within the group might be using at any given time. However, we do presumably want to maximize the odds that any individual within that group can/will get themselves out of that group and become productive citizens. Thus, if we apply a blanket rule, we minimize the number of people who might use drugs, thus maximizing the odds that drug use will become an obstacle to them getting out off the assistance.


It's that same difference of viewpoint I talked about earlier. Should our focus be on helping those in need, or working to minimize the number of people who are in need? The system will work better if we tailor the way we do the first so as to accomplish the second as well.



So we just give up on them? You're also using incredibly short sighted thinking. Prisons and the justice system almost always cost more than the cost of the crime itself. Guy breaks into a home and steals $5000 worth of stuff, and gets sent to jail for a year, costing us $35000. If you're going to use the cost argument in this case, you need to argue it for all cases.

Perhaps there's another factor you're not considering?

That was my point as well, but apparently irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I guess this isn't the place for the Legalize It argument.

It's legal, so it doesn't matter. Pot is illegal, so you choose whether or not you want to be a drain on society.

It's called "tough love".

You're making another big-*** assumption. You're assuming that federal welfare dollars are buying drugs. People usually get assistance because they're injured or disabled in some way and unable to work, not because they're addicts.

Sure, some money does buy drugs. Some probably buy guns too. Why are we not searching all the homes of welfare recipients? Some money likely buys hookers, some other's may fraudulently spend their food-stamps on booze. I bet lots of medicaid monies is spent on legal but unnecessary drugs too.

So, no I honestly can't figure out why anyone would want to spend billions of dollars on a program to make it less equitable, less efficient and extremely intrusive. Why not take that money and route out the fraud in the system?