Punishing Poverty

[groovedaddy]

Being poor and needing public assistance is not a crime. Yet some states and cities, including New York City, are gratuitously inflicting punitive measures on people who seek government help.

Gov. Rick Scott of Florida signed a new law in May that requires all applicants for the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to submit a urine sample and pass a drug test. Last week, a federal judge in Orlando temporarily enjoined enforcement of that intrusive policy on grounds it violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches.

Judge Mary Scriven, a George W. Bush appointee, correctly ruled that the state demonstrated no “special need” for an exception to the Fourth Amendment that would allow drug testing of all aid applicants without any basis for suspicion. She noted that the State Legislature, in approving the law, ignored its own study that found a lower rate of drug usage among applicants for assistance than among Florida’s population as a whole. She also pointed out that the state failed to show that drug testing saved money given the cost of administering the program, and she expressed concern that the tests were a substantial invasion of privacy because the results were available to other government agencies, including law enforcement.

New York City, likewise, stigmatizes those applying for food stamps. The Bloomberg administration continues to insist on electronic fingerprints for all food stamp applicants, even though the rest of New York State stopped doing so for most applicants in 2007. Although the value of fingerprinting in preventing fraud and saving money is dubious, there is no doubt that it deters needy, law-abiding New Yorkers from applying for help and deprives the city of millions of dollars in federal nutrition aid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/opinion/punishing-poverty.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211

[Sarah Ibarruri]

1. Fortunately, the court threw out Gov. Rick Scott's urine testing here in Florida.

The man is a criminal himself, but as always, the mega-rich don't go to jail unless they affect other rich people.

Welfare is vital and necessary for all countries.

The only objection I have with regard to poverty and welfare has to do with having children. People who need welfare should stop themselves from having further kids until they're out of the dangers encountered in poverty. I didn't have kids. It's not that difficult. I used birth control.

If one is already in poverty, having additional children is a mistake, and wrong to all additional children one brings to the world. One should hold off on having additional children until one is out of poverty, if ever, and women (and men) who are on welfare should be required to go through sex education classes.

That said, I think oftentimes the poor are in a horrifically bad mental, emotional, and psychological place; a place in which sex takes the ultimate priority, and getting pregnant is almost a medal or an award. Further, too often children are used to get or retain a man, or get or retain a woman as partner and those in poverty are no exception to partaking in such silliness, but for the poor, having children sinks them further into destitution.

It is SO MUCH EASIER to handle life in poverty when one has no children. One has mobility, one has a chance to live with others (which one cannot often when one is riddled with kids), one has a chance to take free classes, if these are available, and so on.

But again, people in poverty are in a psychologically horrible place, and often don't see the forest for the trees, so they many of them imprison themselves into that sort of life by continuing to have children. As a feminist, I hate to see women do that to themselves. Children lock women into a place, or a situation when insisting on having children while living from hand to mouth, and they corner themselves deeply in.

[Name removed]

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[Guy Whitey Corngood]

4. Which loans require drug tests as part of the application process? nt

[groovedaddy]

5. Should we require a drug test for voters too? n.t

[Glassunion]

6. After the 2000 and 2004 elections, I'm almost inclined to say yes.

[dtexdem]

3. Yes, I say, flog them until they give up being poor and decide to become rich.

;-)

[NMMNG]

7. If only corporations had to jump through such hoops to get their bailouts

They should. They are "people" now, after all.