Up North Progressive

Just like every other state in the country that passed a ‘test welfare recipients for illegal drugs’ law, Michigan successfully wasted taxpayer money testing 303 welfare recipients and found 0 positive tests. This is consistent with other states that also passed drug test people on welfare laws, and successfully wasted taxpayer money testing people who don’t use drugs.

Michigan’s law was passed in 2014. It was a pilot program designed to screen people receiving assistance benefits from the state to find all those lazy blood suckers reaping the benefit from everyone else’s hard-earned income stolen by the dirty, no-good liberal revenuers. This bill, and others, like the ‘make unemployed bums pee for the money they paid into unemployment insurance from their own paychecks’ bill some states have considered are designed to shame or scare people too lazy to get a job morans from taking money from the government. That’ll learn em!

Except, states that pass these laws find very few people receiving assistance test positive for drugs. This means the vast majority of people who receive food or cash benefits use that money to buy food or pay bills. What Republicans like to gloss over are the millions of dollars paid to privately owned drug test companies selling the drug tests to the state. Florida governor Rick Scott owned shares in the company that won the contract for that state – shares he quickly transferred over to his wife’s stock portfolio to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Florida spent millions on testing welfare recipients with nothing to show for it but increasing Governor Mrs. Scott’s dividend checks.

So far, Rick Snyder hasn’t said anything about the results, and the $300,000 of taxpayers’ money allocated to spend on collecting poor people’s pee hasn’t been completely spent. We will have to wait until this fall when the pilot program is complete before confirming what we already know – people willing to apply for assistance aren’t doing it to make a score, they need to provide for their families.