States have been joining in this wild new trend: Making welfare recipients pee into a cup! If there’s drugs in the pee, no more benes for yoooooou.

I can see the logic. Who wants to know that their Hard Earned Tax Dollars are being spent to fuel some lazy fucker’s drug habits? Those with addictions don’t deserve our ‘gift’!

And then I pull my head out of my ass and notice reality.

The shit doesn’t work like they want it to.  It disproves their theory each and every time. Those on welfare use drugs at a lower rate than the general population. No, really. It’s almost as if it’s really, really difficult to get your hands on some weed when you can barely pay for food.  Or something.

All these lawmakers are doing is proving just how quickly they can waste tax money by getting the public all fired up about some straight up bullshit. And then you have state after state going “This time, it’ll be different!” and doing the same thing with the same results, wasting more tax money and you know what?

This is going to sound very off the wall, but they could have taken that money and used it to raise the amount people get on welfare. I’m serious and my reasons are not completely selfish.  The payments are already miserably low, hard enough to scrape by, especially with a family. I got a letter from the state telling me the full amount that I received between EBT and Cash Assistance.

About $2500. All year. If I wasn’t living rent-free in exchange for doing chores and shit, I’d be so royally fucked.  The wait list for Section 8 is counted in YEARS.  I’d have no place to stay.

As much as I would think I’d like to get fucked up in those circumstances, how the fuck would I even pay for a dime bag?

Raise the amount of benefits.  Give some of the poorest folks in your state some right to some dignity. Oh, what’s that? Pay us too much and then people will just quit their jobs and get on the benes?

Man, y’all have no respect for any of the poor, working or not, do you? There’s a reason why I offer anyone who thinks its easy being on the dole to try it.  Not one of those bullshit ‘eat on only blah dollars a week” experiments.  Quit your job and join us? See just how ‘easy’ it is?

Case in point: I got a letter last month because my medical opinion note from my doctor had expired. So I have my new doctor fill out another one, because none of my shit’s going away (and I’m on Year Two of the Disability Tango).  The first of the month rolls around and nada.  So I call to ask why.

There was a date wrong on the form.

I lost my benes because of a wrong date.

So now I have to go back to the doc and fill out a new form (or, since this one was faxed, just fill out that page) just so I can get money for next month – the clerk, one of the few understanding ones, had my case reopened so I could get that and EBT for this month.

You want to go through this AND get randomly piss tested?  You want to go through the running around, the double checking, the rooms full of hundreds of other people all waiting for the same or similar things, the wrong forms, the wrong ways to fill out the forms, just so you can eat and/or buy some fucking toothpaste?

Are you willing to give up that much of your dignity?

Then why would you do this do your fellow humans?

Photo by micahb37