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from the unreasonable-searches-and-seizures dept.
Via Common Dreams, the American Civil Liberties Union reports
[December 3], a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a 2011 Florida law mandating that all applicants for the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program submit to suspicion-less drug tests violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable government searches.
[...]The 11th Circuit panel's order rejects arguments made by attorneys for the State of Florida that government has the authority to require people to submit to invasive searches of their bodily fluids without suspicion of wrongdoing, stating "the warrantless, suspicionless urinalysis drug testing of every Florida TANF applicant as a mandatory requirement for receiving Temporary Cash Assistance offends the Fourth Amendment."
[...]A 2012 review of the TANF mandatory urinalysis program found that the state of Florida spent more money reimbursing individuals for drug tests than the state saved on screening out the extremely small percentage.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Thursday December 04 2014, @05:45PM
In this case that law was created because of the belief that people were just buying drugs with their support money. Really shows what the law makers thought of people who required financial assistance.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by keplr on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:55PM
It probably was true, in at least one case. It's important to get a sense of the scope of the problem. People who are against welfare are usually operating under two misconceptions.
Misconception the first: they VASTLY over-estimate the amount of money budgeted for welfare. SS and Medicare don't seem to often count in their minds because you "earn" them through your working years. Just ask one of these people what percentage of the budget goes to these "welfare" programs they're against. You'll notice two things: the number will almost certainly be wrong, and almost certainly be too high--often absurdly too high. Actually you get this problem with a lot of things. People think we waste a huge amount of money on NASA when it's actually just 1% of the budget. They just don't understand what they're talking about.
Misconception the second: they VASTLY overestimate the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. When you confront them with the facts, things like that the Food Stamps program (SNAP) is one of the least corrupt, most heavily scrutinized, and most effective government programs, they refuse to believe it. When you point out facts like the GAO report [gao.gov] to them, which found that incorrect payments (overpayments, or payments to people who were not eligible) are down 56% from 1999 to 2009, to a record low of 4.4%, they simply refuse to believe reality. Other reports show similar numbers for other programs. I was told this Thanksgiving by a conservative relative that if the GAO report conflicts with his conception of massive fraud and abuse, then the GAO report must be wrong. I was then regaled with a litany of personal anecdotes; the usual tired, vaguely racist, apocrypha. "I saw one of these Welfare Queens with her five children in tow, not a father in sight, hauling cases of Mountain Dew and cartons of Twinkies up to the counter to pay with her EBT card. She was of course chattering away on her Obamaphone in her incomprehensible urban slang to one of her supernumerary baby-daddies. Motivated purely by curiosity, and not fuming racial hatred, I discretely followed her into the parking lot where I saw her load her basketball team sized family into a late model Cadillac SUV. This is, I am sure of it, a representative sample of the welfare experience in America." And on and on like this. I'm being hyperbolic, but I'm not having to embellish too much from what he sincerely related to me as true experience and analysis. These people are helplessly biased, prejudiced--and they just don't know what they're talking about.
If your tolerance for welfare fraud is zero, AND you care enough about the issue to actually work toward that goal in earnest, then the only way forward is to eliminate welfare entirely. For as long as these programs exist and are administered by and for humans, there will be fraud. We'll never get it down to zero. And people who rail against these marginal cases (which are getting rarer all the time as we get better at tracking and correcting abuse) completely ignore the good that's done by these programs. Many of the beneficiaries are children in poverty. Whatever your degree of devotion to the flawed boot-strap-pulling solution to poverty, you can't defensibly apply this to school age children. Hungry children certainly aren't being given equality of opportunity.
There's a disheartening hatred of the poor through all strata of American society. Bizarrely, it's even found among the poor themselves. Christopher Hitchens once said, when asked why Americans don't have Universal Healthcare, that he didn't think Americans want healthcare. We don't think we deserve it.
Hatred isn't good for you, especially self-hatred.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday December 04 2014, @07:37PM
It's not just hatred of the poor, and to limit this phenomenon to that statement is to lie by omission.
What poor rural people have been told for at least 50 years now is that the reason they're poor is that the federal government came and took their money and gave it to poor urban people so that the poor urban people could spend it on hookers and blow. Not coincidentally, the people who, when hearing this story, are most likely to believe it wholeheartedly are those that 60 years ago were using the threat of mob violence to ensure that the people that are now poor urban people couldn't live in their towns. And also not coincidentally, the poor rural people in question are almost universally white, and the poor urban people in question are almost universally black or Hispanic. Hence the opposition to taxation and welfare programs is that they see it as the federal government stealing their money and giving it to n*****s and w******s - they dress this sentiment up a whole lot of ways, but that's what it is in a nutshell.
And there is no government report, no speech, no professor, no statistical data, and no research paper that can convince them that this isn't the reality of the situation. They've already made up their minds, and if you present any opposing facts you are part of the grand conspiracy to take their money. The idea that their money was actually taken mostly by Wall Street (who, incidentally, are statistically the most likely to be indulging in hookers and blow) just never crosses their mind.
Those that are paid to stoke this opinion who are historically minded also like to wrap it up in the Lost Cause post-Confederate ideology that says that the reason for the Civil War was that Abe Lincoln started the war to steal white southerner's property (in fact, South Carolina started the war to protect slavery, and said so proudly), and that the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson allowed the Civil Rights Movement to happen so they could dominate politics by buying black votes with money taxed away from white people. And that logically leads to the idea that by 2065 they believe white people in the US will be enslaved by a black-and-Hispanic-controlled government unless something is done to stop that from happening. And as before it is acceptable to use violence to prevent that outcome.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Thursday December 04 2014, @11:30PM
Your second one ignored the most important part, racism and the "bucket of crabs" syndrome. The reason why you see such hatred is frankly racism which is still very much alive and well, you'll hear codewords like welfare queens which we ALL know is just their way of saying niggers, and the bucket of crabs is why you'll see tarpaper shacks with republican signs on the lawn, they'l happily fuck themselves out of aid or even medicine if it means they keep a nigger from getting it.
its sad that in 2015 this is so but going through most of the red states and talking to folks...yep, sad to say its racism and bucket of crabs.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday December 04 2014, @11:56PM
You missed one of the largest misconceptions. That when looked at across the board, irrespective of petty concerns over deservedness, do we find a net positive result? The misconception is both one of scale (the near willful ignorance of the larger picture for others) and measure (failing to realize we are still better off with her like that).
When we ignore the poor so brutally, we create nothing but animals needing to be handled like animals. That's never a good idea with the most dangerous predator the planet Earth has ever seen. Just in pure actual numbers measuring our environmental carnage.
Perhaps it's better to swallow our pride and realize that one way or the other we will be dealing with these welfare queens and their generational breeding of entitlement. That's solved through education and community outreach, and god forbid, concepts like restorative justice.
This is anathema to some of those people in politics as they wish to turn the United States of America into one large corporate controlled sterile zone. If you couldn't make there, well then, you didn't deserve to be human, and you're being deported for vagrancy. Somewhat hyperbole, somewhat serious. I honestly don't know if these people give any consideration on where these "people" go after they are cut off from resources (even if the recipient is a human waste of skin). Do they think it's a playground where the offending child is just magically removed from recess?
Whatever you do, the end result is a human being living in harsh and scary conditions. That's just stupid and begging for crime. Either that, or we get to sleep at night knowing people are actually dying a little bit faster each day. Those would be amazing human beings too. To die quietly in the street with dignity all while strictly keeping compliance with all local laws and ordinances.
That's the greatest misconception; Our social programs have no value beyond the immediate relief provided, and that they can simply disappear overnight or at all.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday December 04 2014, @10:03PM
That's the thing people never get. Once money leaves your hands and enter mine, it's not your money anymore. You get no say in what happens to it from there.