Newsflash: Poor People Can't Afford Drugs. Test the Motherfucking Rich Instead. Start With Bevin.

Not that any waste of money bothers repug legislators as long as they get to humiliate poor people.

Josh Israel and Bryce Covert at Think Progress:

Low-income Americans who need to enroll in the country’s only cash assistance program—the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—face an onerous process. It typically requires extensive paperwork, visits to welfare offices, and sometimes even upfront job searches. Despite these hurdles, the chances of success are slim: out of every 100 families living in poverty, less than a quarter are enrolled in the TANF welfare program.

But some states have made the process of getting help even more difficult.

At least 15 state legislatures have enacted laws that require drug testing TANF applicants or beneficiaries. Last year, 13 of those testing programs were up and running. That means poor people who try to get assistance in these 13 states have to be screened for potential drug use and, if they are deemed suspicious, must come back to pee in a cup in order to receive benefits. While some states offer treatment programs to those who test positive, in essence, if you can’t prove you’re drug-free, you lose all benefits.

Some states test applicants, some just test beneficiaries. All states use some sort of screening to determine who has a reasonable suspicion of abusing drugs. Some states pay a lot for this screening, some pay next to nothing. Those different methodologies and rules lead to wide disparity in how many people were tested and how much they cost.

For the third straight year, ThinkProgress reached out to each of these states to ask how many applied for their TANF programs and how many were approved; how many of those were given drug tests; how many tested positive and negative; how many were rejected because they refused or did not show up for a required drug test; and the total cost of the program for 2016.

The states’ own data shows the costs were high, yet the positive tests were few.

All told, these 13 states tested 2,826 people out of about 250,000 applicants and recipients in 2016. Of those tested, just 369 came back positive. In four states, drug testing uncovered exactly zero positive tests for the whole year. The positive drug test rate out of all applicants, in states where people tested positive, ranged from 0.07 percent in Arkansas to 2.14 percent in Utah; none of them came anywhere close to the national drug use rate of 9.4 percent for the general population.

Great Idea of the Week

Extend it to CEOs and Board Directors of corporations and I'd say this would definitely put an end to the redistribution of income from the working poor to the filthy rich.

Now all we need is an excuse to deny the franchise to repugs, conservatards, freakazoids and other non-Democratic voters.

 

Allegra Kirkland at TPM: 

If states can drug test low-income residents seeking welfare assistance, why can’t they do the same for members of the one percent asking for hefty federal tax deductions?

So goes the thinking of Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI), who spoke to the Guardian on Wednesday about her new Top 1% Accountability Act. The bill would force taxpayers reporting itemized deductions of over $150,000 to either submit a clear drug test to the IRS or accept the much lower standard deduction when filing their tax returns.

“We’re not going to get rid of the federal deficit by cutting poor people off SNAP,” Moore told the Guardian, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. “But if we are going to drug-test people to reduce the deficit, let’s start on the other end of the income spectrum.”

The Milwaukee congresswoman's bill comes as a rebuke to Republican lawmakers and her state’s governor, Scott Walker. A state law that went into effect in December forces applicants for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to answer questions about their drug use, and Walker is suing the federal government for the right to drug test Wisconsin residents applying for SNAP benefits.

Other officials like Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) and West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D) have pushed for similar measures in their states.

Moore told the Guardian she was “sick and tired, and sick and tired of being sick and tired, of the criminalization of poverty.”

Matt Bevin Wants to Make Your Nana Pee in a Cup

OK, now I think Jack Conway has a chance against this asshole.  But never doubt the ability of DINO candidates to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Which is worse?  That Bevin didn't know Medicare covers everyone 65 and older, including rich white people?  Or that he backed off from his granny-pee plan after he found out it would affect rich white people?

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

During a debate between Republican Matt Bevin and Democrat Jack Conway at Centre College (Tuesday), Conway asked Bevin about his statement from April that recipients of Medicaid and Medicare should be drug-tested.

In April, Bevin said during a Louisville Tea Party forum that he supports random drug testing for recipients of both programs.

"I firmly believe we frankly should drug test people that are on Medicaid and Medicare," Bevin said at the time. "We just should."

During Tuesday night's debate, Bevin didn't back away from that call, saying "there should be expectation of you as somebody who is a recipient, or, as it's often referred to in this state, on the draw."

Conway interrupted Bevin to make clear that he was asking about Medicare and not Medicaid, to which Bevin responded: "Understood." Despite that, Bevin later argued that he was talking about Medicaid.

SNIP

Bevin spokeswoman Jessica Ditto said Wednesday night that "Matt does not support drug testing for Medicare recipients," adding that "what he said in April was a misstatement."

Hey, Matt:  Real libertarians want to get rid of Medicare along with every other government program, including air traffic control.  You're a coward.

Also, the new sign along I-64 next to Kentucky Democratic Party headquarters, the one Matty went crying to the building receptionist about? Twice?  It now reads:

"Matt: Next time bring your tax returns."

You First, Motherfucker

Nice to see Matt Bevin proving his "libertarian" bonafides with a lame repug chestnut like drug-testing welfare moms.

Anybody ask him why test people getting a few hundred bucks a month when you can test the people getting millions of taxpayer dollars a month?  Start with Codell Construction and Peabody Coal.  The rest of the list of big corporations and billionaires getting subsidies and government contracts ought to keep the testing labs busy for years.

Joe Gerth at the Courier:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin called for drug testing of those receiving public assistance at a forum Tuesday organized by the Council of Agency Executives.

SNIP

During the hour-long debate, Bevin gave few specifics on his programs if elected governor, but said that he would push for drug testing of welfare recipients.

"We need random drug testing for the people who are receiving benefits from the state," he said. "I'll tell you, as an employer, one of the first things these people are needing in order to assimilate back into society is to pass a drug test, and they can't."

A: Name three people who were on welfare when you offered them a job, and who subsequently flunked a drug test. Name one. Yeah, thought so.

B. Do you have the slightest idea how much in tax dollars the Commonwealth of Kentucky pays in "benefits from the state," and how much the Commonwealth of Kentucky pays in tax subsidies and sweetheart contracts to corporations, campaign contributors and other repugs sucking off the government teat?  Didn't think so.

C. Who is going to pay for all the negative tests, given that in multiple states, negative tests were 98 percent of the total and ended up costing the states tens of thousands of dollars?

Real libertarians want all drugs legalized, you lying motherfucking moron.

But repug assholes are all about demanding policies that are proven not to work. Especially when all said policies do is shame and demean people who have been impoverished by the austerity policies of the very same said repugs.

Congratulations on the demotion, Matty Boy.

Drug Testing the Wrong People

Divine Irony:

No, Kentucky State Employees, They Cannot Random Drug Test You

A substantial number of Kentucky state employees - nobody knows how many because each cabinet sets its own rules - are forced to submit to obviously unconstitutional random drug tests.

Many of them - under threat of losing their jobs - signed waivers of their Fourth Amendment right against warrantlesss search and seizure.

Now the Supreme Court has essentially told the State of Florida it cannot do the same.  Will anyone in Kentucky care enough to stop violating its employees' constitutional rights?

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to hear an appeal by Florida Governor, Republican and presidential-candidate wannabe Rick Scott. Scott, since 2011, has been trying to mandate random drug tests for some 85,000 state workers because, yeah, drugs are bad or something. Scott’s executive order did not apply only to employees, such as drivers or pilots, whose duties might in fact be severely affected by drug use. Everybody, from receptionists to scuba divers, would be subject. By refusing to reopen the case, the Supreme Court agreed that Scott’s order was so broad as to violate Constitutional protections against unwarranted search and seizure.

The excuse for Kentucky's random drug tests has been that it is limited to "severely affected" employees. But in fact, it is forced on office workers who have no dangerous duty but who happen to work for a cabinet with thousands of employees, a handful of whom fall into the "severely affected" category. Over the last several years, unconstitutional random drug testing has become standard procedure, accepted by thousands as the price of keeping their jobs.

Shame on Governor Steve Beshear and the Kentucky General Assembly if they do not use this Supreme Court refusal to return to a constitutional regimen of drug testing only for probable cause.

The Destructive Uselessness of Drug Testing

Both employers and schools have found drug testing to be useless and counter-productive.  So the drug-testing fanatics are turning to that all-purpose scapegoat, a despised minority: recipients of government benefits.

Oops, I mean impoverished or unemployed recipients of government benefits. No wealthy corporate or individual recipient of taxpayer largesse need face a plastic cup.

Like everything else, the real purpose is to use tax dollars to enrich private corporations.

Isabel McDonald at The Nation:

In the decades since, drug-testing companies have marketed urine tests as a wise investment for all employers. They claim that any drug user is a less productive worker, and more likely to cause workplace accidents, show up late for work or simply quit. Such claims persist despite a 1994 review, by the National Academy of Sciences, of all the independent research published on workplace drug testing, which found little support to back up those claims.

Indeed, one study of employers in the high-tech sector found that drug testing “reduced rather than enhanced productivity.” Performance-based tests, researchers found, are far more effective at assessing a worker’s ability to perform safety-sensitive jobs than drug testing. Unlike urine tests, these tests detect drug impairment and a host of other factors (fatigue, stress, alcohol) far more likely to compromise a worker’s concentration than past marijuana use.

Nevertheless, the escalation of the drug war would prove more powerful than the evidence that undermined it, producing a powerful coalition of government and private industry players determined to convince employers of the wisdom of monitoring their workers’ bladders.

 SNIP

Over the past decade, lobbyists like Evans have focused on what a DATIA newsletter recently dubbed “the next frontier”—schoolchildren. In 2002, a representative from the influential drug-testing management firm Besinger, DuPont & Associates heralded schools as “potentially a much bigger market than the workplace.” That year, the Supreme Court upheld the right of schools to drug-test any student involved in extracurricular activities, from the football team to the chess club. (Many in the drug-testing industry advocate testing all school kids ages 12 and up, but they have failed thus far to convince the courts.)

Like Elaine Taulé, David Evans turned to his own kids for inspiration. He helped the two New Jersey high schools where his children were students to craft drug-testing policies and then set about promoting them as models for schools across the country. In a 2004 radio address, President George W. Bush singled out one of them, Hunterdon Central Regional High School, as a sterling example of “the positive results of drug testing across the country” and proposed committing $23 million of federal education funds to drug-testing high schoolers.

Studies have shown that there is no difference in levels of drug use at schools that subject students to testing and those that do not. And some drug policy experts worry that drug testing may push students away from marijuana and toward drugs such as cocaine, heroin and alcohol—those not generally detected by urine tests.

SNIP

How has the industry countered charges that its tests catch casual marijuana users more effectively than users of cocaine or heroin? By demonizing pot as particularly destructive. Despite having previously advocated decriminalizing marijuana, the first thing Robert (“Test ‘em all!”) DuPont did after leaving office in 1978 was to hold a press conference declaring that “in many ways it’s the worst drug of all the illegal drugs.” With that declaration, he broke from all expert opinion at the time, including his own. Only three years earlier, he was listed as a co-author of a white paper calling marijuana “a minor problem.”

Here's a good rule of thumb: if a corporate asshole or a freakazoid is pushing for government to spend money on something, that's all the proof you need that it's a racket to hurt people who can't defend themselves.

Rationality Breaks Out in Kansas

Hmm. Gov. Bareback Brownback's approval is heading for congressional repug territory; maybe that's given Kansas Democrats a breath of life.

From Firedoglake:

“Drug testing of lawmakers added to Kansas bill . . . [requiring] drug tests of any welfare or unemployment recipient who state officials reasonably suspect is using illegal substances.” A proposal that didn’t make it would have added “state-assisted company owners”.

And:

KS’ Supreme Court “issued a ruling protecting the rights of same-sex couples to both be recognized as the legal parents of the children they are raising together.”

Yet Another Repug Idea Proven Wrong and Money-Wasting

Seriously, people: we could all save a ton of money, time and effort if we just work off the assumption that all repug ideas are so bad, the smart response is to do the exact opposite.

Via Firedoglake:

”A Miami federal judge has declared that Gov. Rick Scott’s order requiring drug testing for state workers is unconstitutional.” This was a victory for a state workers’ union, the ACLU and the 4th Amendment and follows on the heels of another federal judge’s rejection of mandatory drug testing of FL welfare applicants. Maybe it’s time to drug test the people who keep making up these unConstitutional laws.

Forget unconstitutional; it's plain stupid. From Think Progress:

Drug testing welfare recipients doesn’t save any money. Studying results of the drug testing policy’s implementation in Florida, the New York Times found that “[b]ecause the Florida law requires that applicants who pass the test be reimbursed for the cost, an average of $30, the cost to the state was $118,140. This is more than would have been paid out in benefits to the people who failed the test.”

But I'll bet drug testing state legislators and recipients of government contracts and government subsidies like Big Oil and Big Pharma and Big Ag would turn up tons of druggies.

Michigan Repug Goes Rational on Drug Testing

This isn't a new idea, but its endorsement by a repug is an interesting twist. My guess is that he's got a personal grudge against a particular CEO or else a political death wish.

From Wonkette:

Here is a nice story, fellows! A Republican representative in Michigan is not only against pee-testing those vile, filthy, scabies-befouled and constantly drug-addicted Medicaid queens, he has also introduced a bill requiring one-percenters to pee in the cup if they would like a government handout too! Now let us all hold hands and sing together, for niceness!

Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, introduced House Bill 5527 on Wednesday that calls for top executives in companies to be drug tested if they receive certain tax breaks from the state. The bill currently has four co-sponsors: Pat Somerville, R-New Boston, Judson Gilbert, R-Algonac, Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, and Jim Ananich, D-Flint.

That is so many R’s!

The bill says that any company that gets a loan, grant or tax credit from the Michigan Strategic Fund would have its president, CEO and anyone who reports directly to the president or CEO drug tested.

“I don’t know if it will go anywhere,” Rep. McMillin said. “I honestly believe this will be in the mix if we go in the direction of testing Medicaid recipients.”

Which, again, he is against.

Most of McMillin’s cosponsored bills seem to be variations on making it harder to unionize and making sure there is never a Romneycare mandate for health insurance, so don’t get out the Arlen Specter Welcome Wagon just yet. Still, though: yay, you, fellow traveler Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills! Now your next opponent will use this Special Wonkette Endorsement to murder you at the polls. :( [MichiganCapitolConfidential]