Morning Read: Warren County leaders say welfare recipient “freeloaders” should be drug tested
Denton Publications is reporting that Warren County leaders are urging that recipients of welfare payments in New York state be tested for drugs.
A resolution supporting the idea passed on Friday, according to an article penned by Thom Randall:
Ralph Bentley of Horicon contended that taxpayer money paid to some welfare recipients freed up their personal funds to be spent on drugs — so in effect the county was supporting drug habits. Mandatory testing, he said, would be effective in preventing such expenditures.
“All our highway employees have to go for random drug and alcohol testing, and if the test is positive, they’re fired and lose their license,” Bentley said. “Why shouldn’t freeloaders be subject to the same rules as people who work?”
Other supervisors raised constitutional and practical questions, according to the article, which you can read in full here. But according to DenPubs, the local resolution passed supporting a statewide law.
What do you think? A good idea to make sure welfare recipients are clean and sober? If you’re forced to look to government for help supporting your family, would you be comfortable being forced to take a blood test?
Tags: crime, drugs, justice, politics, poverty, warren county, welfare
Also people in the US are far far more charitable than people in Europe.
Another factoid I found interesting about giving was that as a percentage of income lower middle income people give the most to charity of any income group including the very wealthy.
But lower middle income people are indeed often conservative.
I’d be more impressed, Kathy, if the study weren’t based on self-reports of giving: maybe those who admit to being godless are more honest about their charitable giving amounts.
Besides, unless I’m mistaken, he’s talking about all charitable gifts, not just those targeting the poor. I’d be interested to know what percentage of the giving that he reported actually went to poor people.
In any case, you wrote “Conservatives do care about the rights of the poor.” Charitable giving is all very well, but it has nothing to do with rights.
And even if liberals gave at the same rate that conservatives claim to, and if every dollar went directly to the poor, my guess is that it would still fall far short of what is needed. I could be wrong…
Kathy – I’d want to see his methodology. If he is counting church donations as charity, I’m not sure that counts. But if conservatives are donating more to United Way , then that would be significant.
Test ’em all, but don’t stop there. Let’s test all of our elected officials for alcohol. While we’re at it let’s test all those who work at social services too. There ought to be a lot of positions open after that. Think of the employment boom…
Kathy: ” I just don’t see the value of it relating to this topic. Conservatives and Liberals are both guilty of this and it’s more of a diversion than anything.”
So here’s the deal – from my perspective. You can look at a broken law as a broken law, each broken law being equal. So if a thousand welfare cheats and a thousand bankers broke one law each it would be the same. And even if you said that the value of each infraction didn’t matter, I would still contend that it is more important to go after the crook with greater authority in society.
It is simple really. If you put a thousand welfare cheats in jail it is not a deterrent to the crooked banker or politician. But if you put a banker in jail it becomes not just a deterrent to all bankers but it also becomes a symbol to everyone else in society that you are really serious about crime, that we as a society are not going to stand for criminal activity at any level.
The way things are now a reasonable person could conclude that there are two separate justice systems, one for the poor which will crack down hard and one for the rich which will just get an occasional Martha Stewart (woman) as an example.
And the justice system we have is even more insidious because people at lower income levels are scrutinized more in daily life than those at higher income levels. Poor people who get traffic ticket tend to pay the fine and incur the points while wealthier people hire lawyers to have their records kept clean. So the poor person on the second offense is dealt with more harshly than the rich person. And the chart keeps diverging in favor of the wealthy.
I am for equal treatment of criminal offenses.
And I could go on for a lot longer but let me more one more point. As a nation we spend far more resources policing the possible infractions of the poor than we do the possible infractions of the wealthy. If a person shoplifts a pair of underwear at Walmart the police will arrest the person and throw them in jail. But there are only a handful of investigators policing the trillions of dollars of transactions by major banks, credit card companies, and Wall Street firms. Virtually every major IPO on Wall Street is a SCAM!!!! They are fixed to benefit people who are connected to the system and if you as an ordinary individual want in of a major IPO forget it. Just one example of many I could cite.
The issue should not be about liberals or conservatives. It should be about targeting a group that as a group haven’t committed a crime, unless you want to count being poor as a crime.
Pete has got it right.
In fact isn’t that what Woody said “Being poor isn’t a crime in the United States, but it might as well be”.
Well said, KHL.