I agree! This is why I've long argued that companies should be required to pay a portion of their employees' paychecks in nontransferable vouchers. If parents want to blow their I-Bank or Google paychecks on MacBooks, cocaine, and hookers, after responsibly buying jackets and healthy food for their kids, that's their prerogative. But the first $n0,000 should be paid out in restricted vouchers to make sure they provide for their kids first.
Another way to do this would be to have a Basic Income that pays out to minors separately from their parents, but into an account/card that, for minors, is restricted to certain products/services (somewhat like how foodstamps work, but more generally toward childcare/food/clothing/education-type products.) The parents would have power over the child's account, just as parents do today, but only given the same restrictions.
I think this is feeding into a prevalent and false narrative that persons in poverty are all drug addicts or welfare queens.
Christian Parenti really sums it up well when he describes American views on poverty in his book, The Soft Cage:
"In a society that denies the true causes of poverty—low wages and structural unemployment—the poor necessarily show up as objects of mystery to be examined, measured, interrogated, and indexed, or as James C. Scott would put it, made “legible.” In a society that hides the real mechanics of exploitation and sees all social phenomena through the lens of individualism, it is assumed that the poor—their genetics, their habits, or their culture—must be the true cause of poverty."[1]
Specifically with respect to your point about drugs:
"Reports such as the National Survey of Drug Use and Health suggest drug abuse among welfare recipients is hardly widespread. Many states have tried drug testing for welfare recipients with practically nobody testing positive. In Arizona, for example, in 2012, after three years and 87,000 screenings, one person had failed a drug test. Utah's drug screening program spent $30,000 on testing and only 2.5% of recipients turned out positive for illicit drugs. Florida's program had the same results.
"In all cases, the testing -- which assumes all welfare recipients are druggies -- cost much more than the savings in welfare payments."[2]
We need to stop acting paternalistically toward the poor and, instead, treat them as people who are capable of making their own decisions.
This is silly - the poor are not unemployed, structurally or otherwise. To be unemployed one must be looking for work, which most American poor are not.
Your source [2] also disagrees with you. When Florida implemented drug testing, they spent $46k to identify 108 drug users (presumably taking them off the welfare rolls). Unless welfare costs less than $425/person, that's a net savings. Further, according to the article linked to by [2] (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story...), the actual number in Florida is closer to 2000 people since 2000 people withdrew their welfare applications when they reached the drug testing stage.
(The comparable number in Utah was $2000/person, if we assume Utah's program had no deterrent effect whatsoever. Arizona's program seems less effective, likely because the drug tests were easy to avoid - just don't tell the welfare clerk you do drugs and you can skip the test.)
Let me quote the first paragraph, which you apparently didn't read:
...46.2 million people...lived below the official poverty level...10.4 million individuals were among the “working poor”
in 2011... The
working poor are persons who spent at least 27 weeks in
the labor force (that is, working or looking for work )
> This is silly - the poor are not unemployed, structurally or otherwise. To be unemployed one must be looking for work, which most American poor are not.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level. Also, if you know anything about the workings of Temporary Assistance for Need Familiies (TANF), the main federal block grant for welfare as defined under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), then you know that 1) welfare recipients must work for 24 months to continue receiving welfare, and 2) that there is a 5-year lifetime limit on being in welfare [1]. So, though your report mentions that most people below the federal poverty line, there's plenty of evidence to assume 1) those who aren't working are also not on welfare, with the possibility that 2) those who aren't looking for work have simply given up, as is the case for many, many Americans post-2008 recession.
> Your source [2] also disagrees with you.
Clarification, if anything the source disagrees with itself since the entirety of my use of it was within quotation marks. That said, I don't think it does disagree with itself. 1) We have no idea what the welfare/person spending was, as you note, so it's "silly" to assume that there were obvious net savings when we simply don't have the data. If you're not willing to trust the source on that, then at least trust the numbers for Arizona and Utah. Secondly, you say that "the actual number in Florida" was close to 2000, that 2000 people withdrew their applications when reaching the drug testing stage. You're obviously implying that they withdrew because they were on drugs and wary of not passing the test. You fail to mention the financial aspect to the drug tests--the welfare applicants themselves had to pay for the drug test according to the source you link to [2]. It was highly plausible, as noted in the article, that the ones who didn't take the test couldn't net that amount of cash.
As to Florida's program itself, it was deemed unconstitutional and stopped since it "unconstitutionally mandated searches without suspicion."[2] This was for the same reason you note that the Arizona program was "less effective"--namely because it didn't assume that just because a person was poor, they were using drugs.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level.
I certainly am accounting for those who've given up. They are "not looking for work", i.e. not unemployed. Accounting for children does change the fact that the poor choose not to work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2130441 .
As for your assertions that paying $30 for a drug test prevented people from applying for welfare, that doesn't pass the smell test. Anyone who passed was reimbursed, and welfare pays well over $30 anyway. If you want to hang your hat on the fact that I haven't found a source proving that welfare costs more than $425/person, be my guest.
(On a side note, a "large bag of cocaine" sounds like a business investment, investing in the highest return commodity available to the investor... not that I condone it, but it is somewhat different from what I assume you intended, namely buying recreational drugs for personal use rather than providing for one's children).
Well, "data" might not have been the best choice of words. I was thinking back to the times I've seen, interacted with, or heard second-hand of drug addicts (or read studies) -- and I couldn't think of any cases where the statement hold true. The only context I could see it as true, was as an (unfounded) prejudice.
So, I was really just wondering if you've ever had any first or second-hand indication that your assertion isn't just bullshit.
