They don't drug test on SNAP Benifits, because everytime the GOP tries to pass a bill to do so, the ways and means committee reminds them that it would more than double the cost of the SNAP program to pay for even the most lenient drug testing. But they do try every few years.
They would rather pay more than the entire program already, to get those filty poors off assistance.
Also some fun facts, most SNAP recipients are children, most are white, and most make enough money to no longer need assistance in under 5 years, at which point they are back to paying taxes. Which pays for SNAP. Making the system quite self- sustaining. It's cost is minuscule to tax payers, and yet it's a constant wedge issue, why? Because of America's greatest fear, that if we do something that benefits people, we might accidently help the wrong people. People who aren't even white.
They tried it in florida and 96% of recipients passed…but not before the state spent $400,000 in taxpayer money with the drug testing company…that had the governors wife on its board of directors
not before the state spent $400,000 in taxpayer money with the drug testing company
Honestly, given Rick Scott's reputation for bilking Medicare into the billions, this is one of the smallest tier scams I've heard of in Florida. They didn't even take the state for a full seven figures (unless, of course, the number is being drastically under-reported which is always a possibility).
Because of America's greatest fear, that if we do something that benefits people, we might accidently help the wrong people. People who aren't even white.
You just explained how unions fell apart, pensions stopped being a thing, schools lost funding, college education went up, and social safety nets disappeared.
I constantly come back to this quote from LBJ
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
By that, I mean the state and corporations will destroy your life for using drugs. How dare you buy illegal devil street heroin because your doctors stopped prescribing you totally reasonably priced and non-addictive Oxycodone® (which your insurance declined to even subsidize) for your spinal injury from when you got hit by an oversized gas guzzling pickup truck going 2mph
Frustrating, because moderate recreational drug use is fine and occasionally even beneficial as a social lubricant or creative spur. Have a beer, smoke a joint, do a bit of LCD, it won't ruin your life.
But also, people do have real material health care needs - both physical and psychological. They need secure homes and nutritious foods and freedom from a certain degree of anxiety. A big driver of the opioid crisis wasn't simply evil pharma companies (although they certainly played their role). It was amateur athletics, construction work, factory work, and other physically strenuous jobs responsible for chronic physical pain.
Rather than providing people reasonable work schedules, protective equipment, and physical therapy for their broken bodies, we just doped them up and sent them back on the jobs. And it work! Productivity surged! For a little while! And then these people became reliant on opioids to the point where they weren't efficient workers. So they were fired and replaced with younger people who were given a new prescription of opioids to treat the next generation of chronic pain. And we did this for three generations. And now here we fucking are.
Now we've got folks in the tech sector telling their staff to start micro-dosing with LCD. We've got online hustlers who are told to stay up for days at a time continuously churning out new work product by leveraging the benefits of amphetamines. We're got sales bros and bar service workers who are expected to drink their clients under the table night after night. We've got sex workers who are expected to endure physical and psychological abuse for a paycheck. We've got IT guys jacked up on whatever the fuck is in modern energy drinks who come off it by smoking a bunch of the most potent weed on the planet.
That's modern drug use for you. Its not a means of lubricating social interactions or spurring personal creativity or taking the edge off pain. Its just a tool to get people to work past their natural limits.
I mean tbf to that last bit "render unto caesar" can certainly be read that way, guy was a radical from a recently conquered territory, I don't think very many Judeans of his day would have had the best impressions of where their new taxes were being spent.