Phatscotty wrote:Wow! really? I have said, over and over again, this has nothing to do with stereotyping welfare recipients as drug addicts, nor do I believe anything close to that!. If that's what you got from this thread, I have a hard time believing you read anything other than posts that accuse me of stereotyping, which completely misses the point. Nor does the % of people who use drugs on welfare compared to % of working people who use drugs? Completely irrelevant and never once have I tried to use that argument to support anything.
WTF duk? This is all about oversight of abuse, and making sure families that need help get help. Whether or not the specific example (Florida) is the best way to do it is completely debatable! I have some problems with the program myself, and I am still going to wait for more information in the future.
The reality is that 29 states (I think) have some form of drug testing for various kinds of public assistance. I'm not saying that makes it right, but I am saying this is nothing new. I have even posted evidence contrary to my own opinions, which is something a singing pig/troll probably would not do. Why did I post the results of the initial 30 day study of the program? Because some of it supported some of my thoughts on the issue, and probably more of it opposed my thoughts on the issue. The way a lot of people handled that post was pretty ridiculous, jumping all over me and throwing brain bleach in my face. If the program doesn't work, do you really think I'm going to sit here and say the program worked? No. Am I still going to say welfare abuse is bad? Yes.
Okay, I really don't want to devote my life to this thread, but I made some accusations which you've answered in a reasonable fashion, so I guess I owe you the same.
1. I've followed this thread on-again off-again, not consistently. So you may have made some reasonable statements along the way which I didn't see. Whenever I have looked in on this thread, people were making good points and you were ignoring their good points while either selectively ridiculing their weaker points or just going off in new tangents. But there is a possibility that, since I was random-sampling the debate instead of methodically following all of it, that I might have gotten the wrong impression. If I'm wrong about you I apologise.
2. Very early on I said that there you might be simply concealing a desire to abolish welfare outright. I said that was certainly worth debating, but if so you should call a spade a spade and make a thread about abolishing welfare, and not hide behind sanctimonious talk about how you worry about the poor welfare people ruining their lives with drugs. At that time you ignored my post, but you denied it when other people said it. More recently, however, you have said things which basically amount to admitting exactly what I said. Does it look like you've finally been outed after arguing on false pretenses for months? Maybe I'm exaggerating the importance of this, maybe not.
3. One of my posts early on said, in brief, that yes drugs are a stupid waste of money, but so are countless other recreational activities, so why exactly are you picking on drugs? Is this some just some religious Puritanism, or have you swallowed the War On Drugs propaganda that your government spews out? If so, it seems weird that someone who knows how much the government lies about every other issue would somehow expect the government's line about drugs to be truthful.
Speaking as someone who has from time to time (and no, not very often, but quite literally "from time to time") enjoyed recreational drugs, I can assure you that not only have I managed to maintain an honest and responsible lifestyle all that time, but in fact 90% of the drug users I've known have been responsible, employed citizens. And yes, I've known a few of the other kind as well, who lived the degenerate lifestyle that the propaganda would have you believe is an inevitable result of drug use, but these had other qualities that may have contributed to their lifestyle.
I'm getting a little off topic here, but bear with me for just a paragraph or two, and I promise I'll get back to the point. In grade 5 there was a kid I knew well, Richard ___. Richard was the kind of kid you call a general all-around fuckup. He was always in trouble with the teachers, always late with his homework, always breaking a rule of some kind, always engaging in some petty theft or other, and so on. He certainly didn't do drugs, of that I can assure you. In the little village that we lived in, there were no drugs. Our school, all six grades, totalled about 50 kids, so we all knew each other's business pretty well, and I can guarantee there's no way Richard was getting drugs without the rest of us finding out.
We transferred around a bit, I didn't see Richard for a few years. When next I met him in grade 9, our little village had been absorbed into the big city next door (the big city of 14,000 people... I know that probably makes you laugh) and we were now in a high school of 450 students and yes, drugs were available. Of course Richard was heavily into stuff, and soon I was hearing stuff like, "That Richard ___ is a big druggie now. He's become a total loser." It's like, OMFG people! I knew him in grade 5, long before he even knew what a joint was, and he was a total loser then! What makes you think anything has changed? So, long before I became politically active, I already understood that all the propaganda was a pile of crap. Druggie losers were already destined to be losers before they discovered drugs, and hardworking honest people don't stop being hardworking and honest just because they spark up a joint on Saturday night.
It's really ironic that the War on Drugs is prosecuted most heavily in the U.S., when people like Thomas Edison, who did more than anyone else to make the U.S. the industrial powerhouse that it is, openly admitted that cocaine was what gave him the energy to work 20 hour days and accomplish all that he wanted to. But now enough about the drug culture, back to the point.
So I posted, if you're worried about people on welfare wasting their money, why are you focusing on drugs instead of psychics or 976 sex lines or fast food? When I made that post you totally ignored it, but I did get a response from Night Strike, who said, "the difference is that drugs are illegal, and all those other stupid activities are not." Now, I happen to think that most politicians are dishonest, and therefore any similarity between legality and morality is purely coincidental. To me, whether something is illegal or not is not a valid argument for judging it, but while I might disagree with Night Strike on that point, I can understand and respect his opinion on that one. It seems to me very much like the William F. Buckley attitude, that if we want to build a society based on the Rule of Law, then we have to obey the letter of the law no matter how much contempt we have for it. It's a reasonable argument, wrong in my opinion, but reasonable.
If you just want to hang your hat on Night Strike's nail then so be it, but I suspect from other things that you've posted that you're not so trusting of government motives, so falling back on that may not be convenient.
4. We had a discussion at one point, which is related to #3 although not identical to it. I said, if you're really worried about welfare people wasting their money on drugs and other things, instead of the virtually impossible task of prohibiting things, why not go the proactive route, and simply provide the necessities that you think welfare should provide? Contract directly with the landlords to provide apartments, contract directly with the grocery stores to provide a balanced basket of groceries, contract directly with the bus companies to provide bus passes, and so on? And you seemed to agree with me, but at the end you said something which I thought was very revealing, something like "it will make more people hate welfare cases, and that's all that matters." (Sorry if I don't have the wording right. Like I've said before, I'm not going to devote my life to this thread. If you want to search and look it up then go ahead.) This tends to reinforce my belief, which I stated in point #2 and will again return to later, that for you this is not about drugs at all, or even about improving the efficiency of the system and saving money, but simply a veiled desire to attack all welfare people through any means at all.
5. A lot of the debate has been about the costs of the system. I haven't really bothered with that end of it. As far as I'm concerned, anything run by the government will be more expensive than it needs to be. Hell, I can hire a kid down the street to cut my lawn for $10, but when the city cuts a lawn on a power-of-sale property it takes them two heavy trucks and three unionized labourers at a net cost of more than $250. So any cost-benefit analysis for a government program that leaves out the inevitable mushrooming of government costs is just pie-in-the-sky. The test the biochem company sends might cost $14, or it might cost $20, or it might cost $60, but by the time the government surrounds it with bureaucratic "oversight" and "management" you can be sure the true cost will be something that will make your head swim.
So, I didn't bother entering that part of the debate, but I will tell you something I observed: In your earliest posts, you were insisting on a figure of $14 per test. Player called you on it, and you were unable to defend the $14 with any evidence, and you dropped it for some time. But then, much later, I saw you
again mentioning the $14 figure. Now this may have been just laziness, throwing in a number without thinking it through, in which case it's forgivable. None of us are getting paid to debate here, it's just a hobby, so lazy reportage is not a crime. But if you did that deliberately, then it is classic trolling behaviour. To back down on a fact you can't prove, and then to reintroduce it later, after people have assumed that it was dealt with and is over and done, that enrages people. If it was deliberate then it is dirty pool and it does leave you looking very much like a troll. I hope you can see that.
6. Another major part of the debate has been around the effectiveness of the program in modifying behaviour. Again, I haven't bothered with this, because I think the whole War on Drugs is based on false premises. The very idea that we should protect people from the dangers of drugs by providing them with the safety net of some nice comforting jail time and carrying around a criminal record for the rest of their life is just so ludicrous that I honestly can't be bothered to debate it. However, there are a couple peripheral points which I think might be worth mentioning. You did say at one point that there may be people who got themselves "cleaned up" in anticipation of the test. (The very terminology is prejudicial: what, smoking pot is "dirty" so you need to "clean yourself up" from it, but if you just drink lots of gin-and-tonics then those are "clean" because they're legal? But I digress again.) You may very well be right: there may in fact be quite a few people who were helped in that way. But there may have been also people who got worse instead of better: knowing that they couldn't kick their Percodan habit in time for the test, they decided to just give up on welfare and turn to auto theft to pay their rent. I don't think you can say you've been debating honestly if you talk about possible positive outcomes and refuse to talk about the possible negative outcomes.
7. Another major aspect of the debate has been the right of privacy, and the implications of what applying for a government program means. You've said stuff like (forgive the paraphrase) when you accept help from the government you give up your rights, and you've steadfastly refused to consider alternate arguments. Let me just take one shot at this, and I promise never to mention it again.
Whether you like it or not, we all benefit from government programs. Notice I say "benefit" and not "net benefit" because I realize that for most of us the costs of those programs outweight the benefits. Still, the taxes will be levied whether you accept services in return or not, so you might as well accept them. You can choose not to go to the public library or the municipal pool, but you will pay for it just the same, so you might as well go and get some use out of it.
Now, my kids went to public schools. In theory I could have sent them to private schools, but I didn't have that kind of money. Maybe if I wasn't paying taxes to support the public schools I might have had the money to send them to private schools. Then again, maybe not. None of us can say precisely what a free market world would look like. We can say, in general, that things would cost less and there would be more choices to make, but we can't say precisely
how much less things would cost or
how many more choices there would be. So, it's ridiculous for me or anyone else to say for sure that if I wasn't paying taxes to support public schools that I would have had the money to send my kids to private schools. There's just too many variables involved. All we can say is "maybe."
So, do I lose all my rights because I sent my kids to a public school? Do I cease to be human because I drive on a public road? Is there no expectation of privacy for me because I drink water that came through a public water purification plant?
For people on welfare the situation is the same. See, welfare isn't something the government invented. Just like most government functions, it's something the politicians usurped from someone else. In the case of charity, it was traditionally the role of churches and holy orders. Private charities still do exist, but they define their scope in very narrow terms, helping address only very specific problems or people within some very specific definition. It's generally accepted that the ordinary, run-of-the-mill form of indigency will be addressed by the government. The person who, for whatever reason, is unemployed or perhaps even unemployable, is accepted nowadays as a government responsibility, no different that the state of the water supply.
Now, I'm a former Libertarian with a capital-L. I'm well aware that taxation is theft, and that government expenditures involve a transfer from someone who earned the money to someone who didn't. Trouble is, everyone is involved on both sides of the equation. Everyone, no matter how responsible and hard-working, receives some kind of government largesse, even if it's only paved roads to drive on. And everyone, no matter how poor, pays some of the cost, even if it's only the sales tax on their cell phone or the property tax built into their rent. We are all intertwined in the grasp of this thousand-headed Hydra, and I no longer believe that any of us, except for actual legislators, can be held individually responsible for it.
Nor, with all of the inflows and outflows involved, is it possible for any of us to accurately represent all the costs and all the benefits. If you could, you might be surprised. Did you know that studies show a net outflow of revenue from neighbourhoods that are generally regarded as "welfare ghettoes"? Even among the poorest people, taxes paid outweigh the subsidies received, given that even in the poorest neighbourhoods everyone pays
some form of tax, and not everyone is receiving any subsidy. The only neighbourhoods with net inflows are wealthy suburbs where people farther up on the government food chain live: the bureaucrats, the cops, the judges, and so on. I'll say more about this in point #8, but for now let's wrap up this question of privacy.
Should I lose my right to privacy because my kids went to a public school? Should the Fourth Amendment (see, I know my way around American politics
) cease to apply to you because your feces was a burden upon the public sewer system? Yes, I might have preferred a private school for my kids, and you might have preferred a private sewage provider, and who knows, maybe the welfare case you hate so much might have preferred a private charity to take on his case. None of us had those options, not I, not you, and not him, because we live in a world where those things are assumed to be in the public domain, and we didn't make that choice but we have to arrange our affairs consistent with it.
If you can't see that point then you're really not approaching this with an open mind. You might disagree, but if so I would hope for some reasoning about why you disagree, not just a "DERP" or an irrelevant quote pulled from some neo-con website.
8. When all is said and done, it makes me wonder about what drives you to desire so much the breaking on the wheel of this hypothetical welfare druggie. Now, I don't know what the amounts are in Florida or your other states. Here in the Province of Ontario a single person without a disability gets a statutory maximum of $640/month on welfare. It's much more for the disabled, and also obviously more for families with kids, but let's take this single guy collecting his $640 a month, or $7800 a year. That guy has is approved by a social worker who makes about $70,000 a year, or about 9 times as much, and by a case supervisor who makes about $120,000, or about 16 times as much.
All of them are dependent on the system. If there were no welfare cases there would be no case supervisors. Yet all the right-wing hate seems to be reserved for the guy walking home with his $640 cheque, instead of the guy driving home in the Lexus after having signed the $640 cheque. Why? I'll just let that thought hang there and move on with the next one.
A certain company I've heard of has a highway maintenance contract. A highway maintenance contract isn't a flat rate "we'll give you $5 million and you arrange things as you see fit." The contract runs to hundreds of pages and outlines very specifically what services are to be provided in great detail, and the costs for each. Just as an example, there is a provision for an Emergency Response Unit of two men to be standing by at all times, 24/7, to put up temporary barriers and so on in case of an emergency road closure. Two men times four shifts (if you're not familiar with running something 24/7, it requires a minimum of four shifts, not three as most people assume, because there's seven days in a week) is eight men. In actual fact, this team consists of two. They have cell phones, of course, and when an emergency occurs they can call other people within the company. So far, they've always gotten away with it. It's a workeable system, but ultimately it is fraud. The taxpayers are paying for six more workers who don't exist, and the fact that the company has always succeeded in pulling it off by pulling people from other sites really isn't the point. The area manager who is responsible for this shell game is paid a bonus based on how much money he saves by this type of shenanigan. Saves the company, mind you, not the taxpayer. The taxpayer is paying full price and then some for the non-existant employees. How much does he make? I really have no idea, but I do know that he took his family to Hawaii not once but three times last year. Why is there so much hate for the poor dumbass welfare plug and not for the manager hauling in (probably) hundreds of thousands? (And I wouldn't even mention this situation if it was some isolated case, but by comparing notes with others I know it's the norm rather than the exception in these contracts.)
Go one step further up the food chain, and you have consultants charging $20,000 a pop to tell various government departments thing that are obvious to any person with an IQ above 27. You have hundreds of thousands spent on entertainment costs and junkets, millions spent on replacing computers at City Hall when there was nothing wrong with the old ones, the list goes on and on. It just seems to me that we have bigger things to worry about than some poor bastard who's barely surviving.
Notch it up another step and you have your defense contractors raking in hundreds of millions for weapons systems that may or may not be necessary, may or may not work, and may or may not actually be worth the prices quoted.
Take it to the highest level, and you have your bankers and money-market traders. After the Savings and Loan scandal I was really surprised that you people didn't rise up en masse and hang the thieving pricks from the lamp-posts, letting their bodies rot without burial, medieval style, as a warning to others. Yet not only did you willingly spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars rescuing their quarterly bonuses, but you let them go completely unscathed, so that fifteen years later their understudies would be encouraged to pull off an even greater heist of nation's wealth. And still you do nothing, even arguing against clawing back some of the millions that these thieves paid themselves in performance bonuses after almost destroying the whole world's economy.
Man, I'm not some Marxist hating the corporation. I'm a believer in the free market, and I'm totally on the side of the Hank Reardens of this world. But the reality is that there aren't many Hank Reardens out there. Maybe in the small factories and machine shops, but not in the big centres of wealth. All these money-market dealers and derivatives dealers and investment bankers are people getting insanely rich from a fraudulent system; one that they know is fraudulent and unsanitary, and one that they encourage the further degradation of, every step of the way. So I really wonder, while there are guys out there bilking you for millions and in some cases billions, why are you worried about the poor semiliterate plug with his little three-digit welfare cheque?
It's this kind of crap that has moved me toward the Left. I don't understand how guys like you can obsess about the little mosquito sucking a bit of blood from your forearm while a big Rotweiler is gnawing off your leg.
Not to mention the reality that the public assistance program demands further intervention on taxpayers, so you lose both ways. Your schtick doesn't work on multiple levels. 
