Should you have to take a drug test to get TANF?

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Quote:
a difference between keeping more of your own money and receiving someone else's money. I do

Lord they, the local government, are taking funds from everyone else and paying your damn business bills so yes you can keep more of your cash flow and that is the same damn thing as handing you the funds directly.

It is only a bookkeeping difference and an eight grader should see that let alone a "lawyer"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh no not an 8th grader...I will go one better...a 1st grader would see the difference between keeping more of your own money and receiving someone else's money, and why this distinction matters in this dialogue. What you fail to grasp is the person keeping more of his money is still and remains his money, it is not public money, it is not taxpayers' money, it is not tax money redistributed to him from a taxpayer. It is and remains his money and consequently, it makes no sense for such a person to submit to a drug test before he can use his own money.

As I stated previously, a welfare recipient in Florida is no longer spending their own money but now they are receiving someone else's money to spend at their discretion and it is the fact it is someone else's money which the state seeks to regulate. Specifically, the state seeks to preclude welfare recipients receiving other peoples' money from using this money in a particular and specific manner.

So, let's review. The money the person is allowed to retain is his/her own money, it is not public money, it is not taxpayers' money, it is not money owned by the state, it is not tax money redistributed to him from a taxpayer. As a result of the fact it is his own money, it makes no sense to make him submit to a drug test before he can use his own money. Similarly, it makes no sense to make the CEO of the Marlins to submit to a drug test before he can spend his own money, and this includes the portion of his money he is permitted to retain by a taxpayer subsidy paying for something on his behalf, as this does not change or alter the fact it is his money and no one else's.

However, when it comes to someone else's money given to the individual to spend, which is taxpayers' money, tax money redistributed directly to the individual, money owned by the state, state money, then it makes sense for the state to attach some strings on its use, since it is the state's money, i.e. taxpayers dollars given directly to the person.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

I had no idea of what this "lawyer" is or is not however no one can be honestly this stupid that can turn on a computer so I am placing him on ignore.

Ah, the hubris of the defeated. When logical reasoning escapes you, call the other person stupid. Well, resorting to ad hominems is not an intelligent form of debating, it certainly is not logical, so between you and I, I am not the one suffering from a deficiency of intelligence.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Oh by the way it would seems that the courts at least so far are declaring you can not demand that the poor prove they are not drug users when there is zero reason to assume they would be any more then anyone else.

So far, federal district courts, and if I recall correctly at least one federal circuit court of appeals, have ruled similar or identical programs as violative of the 4th Amendment. So, their rulings are not quite predicated upon what you said above but you were close, and yet so far away.

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@Cycloptichorn,

My friend anyone can pick up some legal language if they wish to and work at it a bit without the need of going near a law school.

So his lawyer vocabulary is not solid proof in my eyes.

Be that as it may I agree with you that he is a far right winger that is willing to stand on his head in order to try to find reasons why the poor should be treated in a manner that is dissimilar from the rest of us.

Or why the rich being on the public dole is not the same as the poor being on the dole.

1 Reply

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Be that as it may I agree with you that he is a far right winger that is willing to stand on his head in order to try to find reasons why the poor should be treated in a manner that is dissimilar from the rest of us.

Or why the rich being on the public dole is not the same as the poor being on the dole.

Tit for tat...you are a far left winger willing to "stand on your head" to condemn a government course of action you disagree with in an effort have life conform to your left wing ideology.

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@Cycloptichorn,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

If that had been the correct interpretation
of Original Constitutional intendment,
then America woud have become a welfare almost immediately.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

An assertion unsupported by fact or logic.

There was no socialism inclined government practice before the 1930s,
so far as I 'm aware. If the welfare state had been intended,
as u imply, then it woud have been manifested in the 1700s,
not waiting until the 1930s.

David wrote:

American was and is based on Individualism, not collectivism.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Another of the same. In truth, America is - and always has been - a mix of both collectivism AND individualism.
Unless you're putting out your own fires, policing your own neighborhood, and inspecting your own food for safety,
I'm sure you'll agree with me.

Your certainty is unjustfied.
Historical fact does not support u, Cy.
The earlier fire departments were private, volunteer social clubs.
Maybe, with research, u can find some early government-based
fire dept. I don't know of any.
As for POLICE, there were none in the early US.
The concept was feared n despised as a threat to liberty;--
"a standing army" the Founding Generation called the idea.
The first police dept. in the USA was that of New Orleans
purchased from the French in 1803. Depending on how
u look at it, either Boston or New York City was next,
the latter getting into business in 1845. Before then,
there were private nite watchmen.

DAVID wrote:

This was NOT the philosophy of the Founders.
Thay 'd have found the views of the Kennedys etc. to be anathema.
David

Cycloptichorn wrote:

While all are entitled to their opinion, I can rest comfortably knowing that the courts agree with me, and not with you.
I suspect you have no explanation for why this is.

Cycloptichorn

U suspect rong:
as predicted by the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville,
the poor used democracy as a weapon to elect fellows
to rip off the rich and middle classes,
for the illicit benefit of financially unsuccessful voters.

David

3 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

OmSigDAVID wrote:

OmSigDAVID wrote:

David wrote:
American was and is based on Individualism, not collectivism.
Cycloptichorn wrote:
Another of the same. In truth, America is - and always has been - a mix of both collectivism AND individualism.
Unless you're putting out your own fires, policing your own neighborhood, and inspecting your own food for safety,
I'm sure you'll agree with me.
Your certainty is unjustfied.
Historical fact does not support u, Cy.
The earlier fire departments were private, volunteer social clubs.
Maybe, with research, u can find some early government-based
fire dept. I don't know of any.
As for POLICE, there were none in the early US.
The concept was feared n despised as a threat to liberty;--
"a standing army" the Founding Generation called the idea.
The first police dept. in the USA was that of New Orleans
purchased from the French in 1803. Depending on how
u look at it, either Boston or New York City was next,
the latter getting into business in 1845. Before then,
there were private nite watchmen.

DAVID wrote:
This was NOT the philosophy of the Founders.
Thay 'd have found the views of the Kennedys etc. to be anathema.
David

Cycloptichorn wrote:
While all are entitled to their opinion, I can rest comfortably knowing that the courts agree with me, and not with you.
I suspect you have no explanation for why this is.

Cycloptichorn
U suspect rong:
as predicted by the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville,
the poor used democracy as a weapon to elect fellows
to rip off the rich and middle classes,
for the illicit benefit of financially unsuccessful voters.

David

Quote:
If that had been the correct interpretation
of Original Constitutional intendment,
then America woud have become a welfare almost immediately.
Cycloptichorn wrote:
An assertion unsupported by fact or logic.
There was no socialism inclined government practice before the 1930s,
so far as I 'm aware. If the welfare state had been intended,
as u imply, then it woud have been manifested in the 1700s,
not waiting until the 1930s.

I agree David.

The U.S. Constitution was not originally understood by the Framers, Founding Fathers, or the founding generation, to permit the existence of a federal welfare state. By welfare I am specifically referring to the government act of taxing peoples' income, taking a portion of the taxed income, and giving it directly to someone else, known as redistributing the wealth.

In the Constitutional Convention of 1787, while the Framers debated the substantive content of the U.S. Constitution, a discuss involving the classes in American society transpired. James Madison addressed the convention and said, "In all civilized countries, the people fall into different classes having a real or supposed difference of interests. There will be particularly the distinction of rich and poor." "The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Volume 1," edited by Max Farrand. So, Madison recognized there will inevitably be rich people and poor people in the country. As a result, Madison, understood there would be a day in which the poor may exist in greater numbers than the rich, and as a result, may use the democratic process to take some, most, or all of the property from the rich and redistribute it to the poor.

Madison stated, "An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence. According to the equal laws of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the former. No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this country, but symptoms of a levelling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters [sic] to give notice of the future danger." Farrand, Volume 1.

Madison went on to state in the "future times a great majority of the people will not only be without land, but any other sort of property" and as a result the government and constitution must "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." Farrand, Volume 1. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson Madison commented, "Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents." Letter from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 1788. http://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/james-madison-letter-to-thomas-jefferson-october-17-1788.html

Madison wasn't alone in this view. Hamilton expressed the thought of in "every community where industry is encouraged...there will be division of it into the few and the many." "The difference of property is already great amongst us. Commerce and industry will still increase the disparity." Farrand, Volume 1.

Adams, Washington, and a few others concurred in Madison's beliefs and his assessment. The remedy then was to conceive of a government and a constitution which did not authorize redistribution of the wealth and precluded or impeded any such desire by the masses to do so. In fact, Madison's Federalist 10 discusses how the property interest of the few (the rich) is protected from the poor under the new government created in the U.S. Constitution, and how the U.S. Constitution was in part conceived to address this issue.

So, to achieve this goal, the Framers limited the powers of the federal government and did not vest it with the authority to redistribute the wealth. As Madison stated, in characterizing the U.S. Constituiton, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” The other steps the Framers took was to make the Senate more independent and detached from the people and have them serve longer terms of office, giving them some immunity for their actions from the populace. As a result, the Senate was originally elected by the state legislatures, as opposed to directly by the people, and they served 6 year terms, although Madison wanted 9 year terms.

So the U.S. Constitution was originally conceived and created to preclude the existence of a federal welfare state.

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

Quote:

as predicted by the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville,
the poor used democracy as a weapon to elect fellows
to rip off the rich and middle classes,
for the illicit benefit of financially unsuccessful voters

Strange is it not that in the case of Rome and now the US republic it is the rich that is doing the ripping off not the poor.

You are however creating a more and more powerful voting block of the poor by driving so many middle class families into that classification.

1 Reply

@BillRM,

DAVID wrote:

as predicted by the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville,
the poor used democracy as a weapon to elect fellows
to rip off the rich and middle classes,
for the illicit benefit of financially unsuccessful voters

BillRM wrote:

Strange is it not that in the case of Rome and now the US republic
it is the rich that is doing the ripping off not the poor.

That has not happened.
Your statement is false.

BillRM wrote:

You are however creating a more and more powerful voting block of the poor
by driving so many middle class families into that classification.

Does "you are" mean that Obama is,
or that the Senate, under control of the Democrats is ??

1 Reply

@boomerang,

Quote:

But I hate to see kids punished for what their parents do and I'm not so sure that letting someone else claim the money for the kids is going to solve anything because the person might keep the money or just hand it over to the parent to spend as they wish....

Tax dollars being used to buy drugs is basically a bad thing.

When Reagan was president, they did a study as to what would happen if they just provided basic food items (cheeseburgers, fries, milk etc.) free of charge at grocery outlets for anybody hungry enough to need such a thing. The basic answer was that such a program even given maximal rates of waste and abuse would cost about a tenth what the food stamp program was costing at the time. The idea never went anywhere of course, too simple, straight-forward, and workable....

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@raprap,

Quote:

...As soon as the so called religious right wing of the GOP recognizes that morality cannot be legislated, particularly with 'victimless' crimes, this unenforceable unconstitutional attack on individual liberty will cease. ...

I don't think it's the religious right pushing the "war on drugs" so much as banks, politicians, corporations which benefit from it and the so-called prison-industrial complex. I have about a baker's half dozen or issues with conservatives and pubbies generally and this is one of the two biggest of such. By way of contrast I'd be hard pressed to think of anything democrats ever do which isn't some sort of an issue.

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

Quote:

That has not happened.
Your statement is false.

Oh two families for example who own the sugar growing areas in Florida had not been ripping off every American for generations by having us by way of Congress paying many times the world market price for sugar?

Just one example of countless examples of the rich ripping off all of us by way of their control of the government.

We no longer even come near to having a government that govern for the benefit of the whole population just for the benefit of the super rich.

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@NotreDame05,

Thank u, ND. That is quite correct
in accurately setting forth the zeitgeist of the 17OOs in America,
whose guiding philosophy was that of John Locke and of Adam Smith,
not of Karl Marx, nor John Maynard Keynes.

David

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

Quote:

...As soon as the so called religious right wing of the GOP recognizes that morality cannot be legislated, particularly with 'victimless' crimes, this unenforceable unconstitutional attack on individual liberty will cease. ...

gungasnake wrote:

I don't think it's the religious right pushing the "war on drugs" so much as banks, politicians, corporations which benefit from it and the so-called prison-industrial complex. I have about a baker's half dozen or issues with conservatives and pubbies generally and this is one of the two biggest of such. By way of contrast I'd be hard pressed to think of anything democrats ever do which isn't some sort of an issue.

So far as the War on Drugs is concerned: I remain a pacifist, in the name of laissez faire free enterprize.
We never granted government power to prevent us from indulging in self-destructive activity.
The War on Drugs is a USURPATION of power.

Government was created to defend us from the violation
of our rights by OTHERS.

David

1 Reply

@OmSigDAVID,

This is one position of the foundering fathers that I happen to agree with 101 percents.

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when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Perhaps David you see nothing wrong with becoming the slaves to such men as the Koch Brothers but I do.

2 Replies

@BillRM,

It's of little use, Bill, as these guys will continue to insist that the sky is green for as long as necessary to accommodate the cognitive dissonance that is generated by their beliefs about reality and, yaknow, actual reality.

Viz David's inability to admit that many different court decisions have shown his attitudes and opinions regarding the use of tax dollars to support the general welfare to be totally false. His only response is to claim that the poor folks somehow rigged the game. It's an admission that he can't stomach the idea that his dearly-held beliefs about life may not in fact be logically sound; the game MUST instead be rigged.

And all the while, the gap between rich and poor grows and grows, while they loudly claim that no such thing is occurring... it's like being divorced from reality, living inside their heads.

Cycloptichorn

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@OmSigDAVID,

Footnote the Boston Tea party had zero to do with taxes and everything to do with protecting the local holders of warehouses full of tea (mostly from smuggle Caribbean tea) from having very very cheap tea by the ships loads dump on the markets of the colonies.

I often had wonder if the creators and founders of the Tea Party were aware of the complete story and were showing their contempt for their followers by giving the movement that name.

3 Replies

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

This is one position of the foundering fathers

I 'm not sure if u mean that as a joke or if u r insulting them.

BillRM wrote:

that I happen to agree with 101 percents.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Jefferson was very eloquent.

I LOVE the words that come immediately b4 those:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. . . ."

BillRM wrote:

Perhaps David you see nothing wrong with becoming the slaves
to such men as the Koch Brothers but I do.

I am not their slave. I do not believe that u r either, Bill.
The Declaration of Independence was written against the King of England, a government.
Those brothers are not a government, nor do thay pretend to be.

David

1 Reply

@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Footnote the Boston Tea party had zero to do with taxes and everything to do with protecting the local holders of warehouses full of tea (mostly from smuggle Caribbean tea) from having very very cheap tea by the ships loads dump on the markets of the colonies.

The Boston Tea Party was a rebellion against control by the English government.

David

2 Replies

@OmSigDAVID,

Sorry but whatever reasons the actions was sold to the people at the time it was to protect the holders of warehouses full of more expense tea.

Any fairly complete history of the time will give you the details.

Second note there was many ships involved carrying the cheap tea to the Colonies headed for a numbers of ports however all but in the case of the Boston port they were not allow to dock by the local colonies governments.

History is never as simple as it is given to school children.

0 Replies

Should you have to take a drug test to get TANF?

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