Scott Walker Calls Food Stamp Drug Testing 'A Progressive Thing'

a reply to: Aazadan

But But But

Walkers point is to "Help" people get jobs.

The cost of any social program is always well spent right?

a reply to: xuenchen

Well, using the same example ~3900 people are singled out as needing help. When they get help and are clean of the drugs, what are they going to do? They were probably on drugs in the first place because they didn't have a very good job and had a lack of job skills. The state is spending $25 million to find these people, then the cost of rehab. Lets say that's another $15 million for all of them (rehab is usually much more than $3900 per person but we'll use that). So the state is spending $40 million total in order to create ~3900 jobs. That's $10,000 per job.

Do you know what else could be bought for that money? The average cost of a community college is $2700 per year and federal grants cover an average of 16% of that so you're looking at $2268 per person per year or $4536 for a two year degree. $40 million essentially buys the state 8,800 two year degrees which are higher paying jobs, which means more tax revenues, which offsets some of that spending in the future.

What's better, creating 3,900 low paying jobs or 8,800 moderate paying jobs for the same expense?

a reply to: JimNasium

I get piss tested randomly in my private sector job and anytime there is an incident on the job. Injury, accident, etc.
I guess i'm a little jealous of government workers then. LE has one hell of a strong Union, but I figured they would drug test to make sure they have the best and brightest members.

a reply to: Aazadan

Ah of course.

The quagmire of social program micro-management.

First of all, conservative ATS poster’s, please don’t take my remarks about Scott Walker as a shot at you personally, or even at Conservatives/Republicans in general. I simply can’t stand Scott Walker as an individual and have nothing positive to say about him or his delusional proposals. I think he’s a political whore and puppet of Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Bros money machine.

I really don’t see what makes Scott Walker viable Presidential material. As Governor he’s trashed Wisconsin in countless ways. He’s certainly not been a job creator for Wisconsin, nor can he balance a budget. It’s well-known that much of Wisconsin’s cash flow has found it’s way into the back pockets of Walker’s political allies/financial supporters. His most recent budget proposed to slash $300 million out of higher education funding while spending roughly the same amount to help finance a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. It just so happens one of the members of the investor group that owns the Bucks is the national finance co-chairman of Walker’s presidential campaign. For Scott Walker, economics in the state of Wisconsin means giving taxpayer dollars to his buddies, while the state’s economy continues to tank overall.

And while Walker’s policy agenda in Wisconsin has been anything but friendly to the middle class, his rhetoric as a Presidential candidate is more abrasive than ever. For instance, Walker brags that he has signed into law one of the nation's strictest voter ID laws - a measure that disproportionately affects minorities, women, veterans, students and the elderly. But when asked directly if he could cite the number of documented cases of voter fraud in Wisconsin, Walker responded, "I don't know the exact number, probably a handful.". Putting it in perspective, more of Walker's aides have been criminally indicted than the total number of Wisconsinites who’ve been convicted of voter fraud.

In general, Scott Walker has spent the last five years turning Wisconsin into a politically divisive, financially drained, cesspool of Good Ol’ Boy backroom cronyism. He’s no friend to the common man. His ambitions are exclusively self-serving, and his loyalties are to big money interests.

And so, regarding drug testing of food stamp recipients, when Walker makes statements like, "For us, it's not a punitive thing, it's a progressive thing" and, "We're trying to help people who are in need of our assistance to get jobs", I have a hard time taking him seriously. He’s simply regurgitating the rhetoric he thinks will get him votes, since simple arithmetic shows what a wasteful effort it would actually be.

Besides, isn’t he preaching exactly the opposite of what he claims to represent ideologically? That being to eliminate government waste and excess? I guess on the bright side, though, we have at least 20 other crooks to choose from...

I thought a drug test could not be used to determine the hiring or firing of an individual and this is the reason they are allowed to do so??

a reply to: enlightenedservant

I think they should just do away with drug tests altogether. They are huge wastes of money. Plus, like I said in the OP, they are invasions of privacy. An employer should have zero business knowing if you do drugs or not.

As for your suggestion, there is something to consider though. If welfare recipients can largely pass these tests with no problems, I'm sure a politician with access to MANY more resources would have little trouble passing them as well. We'd probably just end up wasting more taxpayer money that doesn't result in cornering anyone.

originally posted by: JimNasium
a reply to: Krazysh0t
Carl Hiasson a writer from Miami offered to pay for drug testing for ALL the Fl. Senate and legislature, oddly His kind gesture was DENIED.

That's pretty funny. CH is a good writer btw. I haven't read much of his works, but my parents love him and the books I've read are pretty funny.

I can't say I agree with Walker, but I can say that the source article compared to the graph is about as skewed as you can get to manipulate the readers.

If they are going to include every welfare applicant in the numbers then they should have multiplied the number of positives by the number of times their overall count was divisible by their "control" group. Outside of that they should have used percentages of those that tested positive based on the control group numbers. Clearly manipulative graphs even though they give the actual numbers in the paragraphs below each one.

Kind of baffled as to how they even thought the graphs were correct.....

originally posted by: reldra

originally posted by: TycoonBarnaby

originally posted by: mOjOm
a reply to: xuenchen

I'm not putting thoughts in anyone's heads.

All I'm saying is that to properly counter argue those graphs requires some evidence to do so. Otherwise those graphs that are put up by Krazyshot must be correct.

Straight from the link he pulled the graphs from "In 2014, 446 of the state’s 38,970 applicants were tested. Just 48 tested positive." That was for the first graph. So those large bars on the left of each graph are not the number of people tested. Did you read the source or just take the graphs at face value?

The main point is clear, though. Lots of money was thrown away on the testing and almost nothing was found.

I am not sure why you are upset about this. It's obvious by the graphs and your statements that only a tiny percentage of welfare recipients are actually using illegal narcotics, so the testing will just verify that everyone on the system is a perfect example of clean living. the money doesn't come out of your pocket and if it wasn't spent here, it might pay for some senator's vacation home, so at least you get to see your taxes spent on something for the people.

Or......is it even remotely possible that the information presented might be a tiny bit fictitious?

a reply to: Krazysh0t

He makes an interesting case, but I don't see how drug testing food stamp recipients helps them any. Marijuana is legal in a few states now and people should be able to spend their spending money on what they choose. The idea that people shouldn't be allowed any spending money is silly. People on food stamps spend money on cigarettes all the time. That just means that they can't spend their little extra cash on something else. From what I have seen, if someone on food stamps smokes, they can't afford many other luxuries.

Also, I did the number crunching and they are spending more money on drug tests than they are saving on food stamps. Although it would be nice to know how the people were picked for testing in each state, as they did not test all of them.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

Thanks, Enlightened Servant, that was a good description.

a reply to: darkbake

Exactly. Also keep in mind that Conservatives are supposed to be for smaller government and NOT wasting money. This is a clear case of Conservatives being hypocrites, but gotta keep that base happy that thinks that drugs are evil. Strangely, Walker can't see that that base is shrinking rapidly.

Now just like Chris Christie, positions like Walker's are going to end up being deal breakers for their Presidential candidacies. So we don't have to worry too much. But I feel sorry for the states they come from.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

In the math I worked out a couple posts earlier I gave the numbers if we test everyone once. If we start testing periodically it starts getting much worse. Rather than an example where a state spends $29 million to catch $4.5 million in fraud, you'll start spending way more to catch way less. Let me give an example.

If you have 40,000 getting SNAP and you know 10% of them are on drugs, and you know that people average 4 years on SNAP, that means you're getting roughly 10,000 per year in new applicants. But only 10% of these people are on drugs, so if you test once per year, on that first year you test 40,000 people and catch 4,000 cases of fraud. Now there's 36,000 people on the program and you spent $29 million to "save" $4.5 million. The following year 25% of that drops off and a new 10,000 people are added so you're up to 37,000 on SNAP, but you already know most of those people are clean, only 10% of the new applicants won't be so you find 1000 instances of fraud. Now you've tested 37,000 people to find 1,000 people and that amounts to spending 27 million on the following year in order to save 1.8 million so it's only 40% as cost effective and it was already of dubious value.

Human rights issues aside, the economics of drug testing simply don't work unless benefit amounts go way up or drug use goes way up.

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Oh, I agree that they're invasions of privacy. And I remember reading about Florida's drug testing program, which was possibly enriching the campaign donors & backers of the program. The programs seem to be more about making money for special interests than actually helping or hurting a public cause.

But I also think that as long as the "War on Drugs" exists & our governments are waging this "war", they should prove their belief that drugs are wrong by mandatory tests on themselves first. I mean, think about the hypocrisy. Our last 3 sitting Presidents have admitted to illegal drug possession & usage. Plus Hillary was right there with Bill while he "couldn't inhale", Rand Paul's admitted usage, and so have Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush. So I just think it's highly hypocritical of any of them to support the same drug laws they didn't follow.

I think it's because I'm a bit of a zealot about equality. Either we all get leniency with the laws or we all face the same consequences of them. So if a poor mother has to get drug tested to qualify for the meager amount of taxpayer funds given through food stamps, then so should the person doling out multi-million dollar taxpayer funded contracts in the Pentagon (wow, that's quite the run-on sentence...).

a reply to: Aazadan

Oh, but the numbers do work. Just not in the way we're told they should.

Remember, it's companies that are doing those tests, not the government itself. In other words, the drug testing companies are gaining a large amount of new customers, especially if the same recipients have to take multiple drug tests. So the money is working incredibly well for them and the people with financial interests in them. So follow the money on who is sponsoring the laws & their connections to the drug testing industry. Then the numbers will make a lot of sense.

The only ones losing money are the taxpayers. But since when have special interests or politicians cared about wasting taxpayer money? If the politicians do it well enough, they'll even be rewarded for helping that industry once they retire from public office.

a reply to: reldra


Exactly.

As far as determining the cross section, we have very little information without quite an amount of research on a per state basis, as there was no standard to follow. Each state determined its own standards, and with the varying costs, it's hard to say what method of testing was used.

In order for any of the positives to be accurate, the testing would have to be the same. In order for that testing to be accurate by any reasonable means, the samples would have to be mass spec'd (mass spectrometer), which costs a rough average of $600 dollars per sample. With the dollar amounts presented along with the amount of recipients tested, I'd gather that very few - if any - of the states actually used this method.

Drugs, by and large, are a problem because of drug laws. Alcohol is cheap, readily available and easily as destructive to an individual and families as any other drug addiction - without prohibitive laws. This is obviously a vote pandering witch-hunt, more than likely based off certain ideals that have little to no basis in reality. It is another form of enforced morality and "Do as I say not as I do" attitudes present in a large portion of the population.

Considering that welfare is based off of real income, it's hard to imagine that people who are on welfare have real drug addictions. The drug market is based on cash - for the most part - and if people have so little disposable income that they require SNAP (which is no longer "food stamps" but a "food card") there is hardly room for belief that a remarkable portion of them are serious drug addicts. As for that unremarkable portion, I highly doubt that they represent a drop in the bucket of total SNAP benefits.

As a brief discourse, this is further proof that the conservative position cares only about the unborn, as the main qualifier for welfare benefits is having children. Why care about children before they are born if you throw them to wolves as soon as they come screaming into this world? It makes no sense.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

I meant the numbers don't work for the taxpayer. These types of programs using the data already collected show they cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and they have virtually no return. If you're spending $29 million per state that's 1.5 billion per year wasted.

originally posted by: Aazadan
a reply to: enlightenedservant

I meant the numbers don't work for the taxpayer. These types of programs using the data already collected show they cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and they have virtually no return. If you're spending $29 million per state that's 1.5 billion per year wasted.

I know. That's why I said the only ones losing money are the taxpayers. This is standard procedure for special interests, though. I'm not defending them. Just pointing out what's happening & why politicians both know this and allow it.

1. Invest in a specific company or industry. (Drug testing industry)

2. Draft a bill which mandates new customers and/or contracts for the company or industry you invested in.

3. Find a way to sell your bill to the public. (The "welfare queens" & gangs are using your money for blah blah blah!!!)

4. Lobby your bill to different lawmakers to get them to sponsor, support, and eventually vote for your bill.

5. The bill becomes law and you profit from it.

6. Shift the public narrative towards one of your newer projects, start lobbying for it, and prepare to profit from it as well. This way, the public that supported your previous moneymaking scheme will be too distracted to look into the follow up stats of your plan (like costs, efficiency, effectiveness, etc).

a reply to: Krazysh0t

Yah it probably is "Progressive" as in more Big Government. All I have to say about it. Don't get me wrong. I like Scott Walker and what he has done in his term. But I want to see less government bureaucracy.