Why should a drug addict's babies die? ("Welfare"

Post Reply New Topic

I'm tossing this topic in the pit because I'm empty handed for how to deal with people who have opinions that complete escape my capacity to understand. Maybe you can use small words to explain it to me.

There's a law now in Florida that requires poor people to pay for their own drug testing before they and their children can qualify for public assistance (including Food Stamps and Medicaid, etc.). If an individual passes the drug test, they will be refunded the money for the test. If they do not pass, there's no assistance and no refund. It's pretty clear how this works, although I'm not sure how people are going to receive their refunds or in what timeframe. As a sentimental liberal, I disagree with the whole thing and that's not surprising. A few of my acquaintences are conservative and one told me straight out that she thinks it's perfectly alright for a drug addict's babies to suffer and die, that it will "show" the drug addicts for being addicted to drugs, and nobody who has an addiction deserves to be on welfare, even if their children suffer. She even used proper punctuation and spelling so this wasn't a fanatical rant. With a clear conscience, this was her opinion and it just blows me away. These are my tax dollars, too. I want them to help people, especially the children of drug addicts.

I'm at a loss here. Help me understand, please.

The point is not that drug addicts babies should die. If you want to help drug addicts' babies, then please use your personal wealth to help them. But someone who is not driven by their own desire to help them should not be forced to.

Don't bother. It will only make you angry. They simply don't give a sh**.

The way I understand it, a drug addict in FL can designate another sober person to receive the welfare funds for their children, for which the children remain eligible. The intention of this law is to not hand money directly to a drug addict because they are more likely to use the funds to purchase more drugs, rather than the money going towards the addict's children. The reality of drug addiction is that any funds received are used to first service the addiction, not to buy food or pay bills. The intention of this law is not to deprive children of drug addicts of needed services, but to have the money used directly for the children and not to fund the habit.

I'm not saying I believe this is a good law, but it's not its intention to starve and kill children.

The woman who claims to believe all drug addicts' children should suffer and die "to teach drug addicts a lesson" may have had perfect spelling and grammar, but it still qualifies as a fanatical rant. She would change her tune if her own daughter became a drug addict and her grandchildren were suffering. But her comment, as it is, proposes genocide as a sane response to the problem of addiction. I don't need to tell you this is not really sane of her.

But that's just it. It isn't here children so she doesn't give a f**k. The children deserve to suffer because they have inferior genetics inherited from their junkie parents. In no just world would god allow bad s**t to happen to good people. If bad s**t happens to someone they must have deserved it.

You've got to understand that a drug addict's children are, no surprise, born addicted to drugs, and will likely need lifelong care, care that is beyond this country's capacity to pay for. We are out of money. Therefore, some people will have to suffer and die so that others may live.

It's the law of the jungle, the weak must be eliminated so that the strong may prosper. It is a law that is built into our DNA as animals on earth, and everything eventually goes back to it. We can't afford to pay welfare to those who will use it to feed drug addictions and empower Mexican drug cartels. It is self-defeating as well as not making monetary sense.

The problem with modern society is that the weak survive, and go on to breed more weaklings. Eventually the strong will be seriously threatened. The normal solution is war, but I don't think Americans will like having a war on their soil. Eventually there will be a disease or a famine, and the weak will die.

I think policies that get rid of the weak ASAP are just Darwin in action. Mother Nature does not know compassion, that is where liberalism fails. The world's population has increased by 700% in just sixty years. It is a population bubble, and population bubbles ALWAYS end in a catastrophic collapse to near zero levels. You may not like it, but nature doesn't care, you will die anyway.

You may want to read Ayn Rand, that's where much of the philosophy of the modern Republicans comes from. Reading Atlas Shrugged is only for the masochistic, so you will have to content yourself with Wikipedia summaries. I think that one of the obvious problems with her philosophy is when society purposefully excludes a certain population, then blames them for not getting ahead and then seeks to eliminate them. In a different society, autistics for example would contribute to society, and have for thousands of years, yet the modern USA only cares about social skills, and those without are out of luck. In that case, society, not the person, is to blame. Other than that, Rand is pretty interesting. Her philosophy is basically invert Marxism: the capitalists, not the workers, are the drivers of society, and need to eliminate the workers.

There are no guarantees in life, and no amount of welfare assistance can change that. The only thing that can be done is to leave people free to decide to help if they want to, and let those that don't go on with their lives.

Lack of proper care.

ruveyn

two things come to mind about this;

1. nearly everyone has a tendancy to project themselves onto other people.

An example thats close to home for most of us would be the 'nts' who assume an aspies lack of social grace is an intentional desire to be rude, or the teacher who sees a (non-diagnosed) dyslexic and thinks they are lazy or stupid. They are making judgements based on limited information, but the problem is they dont know that they dont know that information.

An example thats closer to the point is social class - someone whos middle-middle class can have a certain culture and a way of speaking etc and that opens doors (career-wise). They might even waste the early years of their adulthood but then knuckle down and still manage to get into a high-flying career by their 30s. Many will assume anyone who worked as hard as them could achieve the same standard.

With drug addiction, the saying 'walk a mile in someone elses shoes' applies strongly. Noone can really judge, and say with certainty i would have done better because they have no idea of someones background, their neurology, what theyve endured and what mental health problems theyve developed. I dont care if theyve been addicted to that same drug, theyve havent had the experience of having that persons addiction.But people will tend to judge anyway.

2. the central, evolutionarily oldest and most primitive part of the brain is called the r-complex or the reptilian brain, whilst the outer patr is called the mammalian brain. The r-complex is the place of fear, control, survival; traits of cold-blooded animals. Empathy, love and all the higher emotions are products of the mammalian area of the brain. People can tend to think predominantly in one area and form neural pathways that will be tend to be reused. This can be manipulated eg. often politicians are clearly appealing to peoples reptilian traits, vice versa for charities.

From the mammalian pov, you obviously care about the welfare of the babies, if not the parents and (projecting your empathy) it seems unthinkable that anyone wouldnt. But from a reptilian-centred pov someone wouldnt be so concerned - its not that they necessarily want the babies to die, its just that their wither so focussed on cold, machine-like analysis or fear and control for their own percieved good that they have completely different priorities. Its interesting to keep this dynamic in mind when seeing a humanitarian issue being discussed.

According to your philosophy autistic people are weak and should be eliminated. Same goes for the mentally ill. If you can't adapt to the majority NT culture you are simply less fit for survival and by definition that is weakness, an unforgivable character flaw in the grand scheme of Social Darwinism. Aspies are weaklings too. It irritates me how right-wing aspies have such an entitlement complex that they think their particular disability is somehow special and that the world should bend to them. Yet an NT with a different kind of inability is simply inferior.

In any case I don't think the world is really a zero sum game where people who can't "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" need to be sacrificed to the alter of Atlas Shrugged. In a wealthy country like the US there is more than enough resources to go around. We aren't a third world s**t hole that can't afford anything. People simply don't want to pay for a social safety net because they think the people who use it are part of the "other" who are nothing like them.

The poor will charge their tax on you, whether through the government or through crime, so don't worry about it.

@marshall:

Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?

In addition to this, the wider system is governed in a way that actively favours unemployment, in order to apply downward presssure on wages & working conditions, consolidating power and wealth in the hands of the few. (whilst perpetuating an 'anyone can make it' myth)

Its ironic that people near the top of the economic food chain might complain about their taxes going to the underserving poor when the conditions that allowed their inflated salary are the same conditions that created the underclass in the first place

Okay. Thank you. (Everyone else who answered will get their own response. I want to focus on each comment. This was the first I read.)

Now, can I ask how this applies (not being able to use the money for drugs instead of what it's supposed to be used for) applies to such services as Medicaid and Food Stamps, which are very well designed to prevent misuse? While I obviously still disagree with the premise, it makes sense for TANF (which is Cash Assistance). It also makes sense for job assistance, which already requires it. In fact, way back when I was on Medicaid (when Jeb Bush was in charge of Florida), I had to submit to a drug test as part of a "normal physical", a test which was mysteriously absent from my physicals under private insurance. The difference between what was currently in place and what's been passed is that now people have to pay for their own drug test up front. Instead of a drug addiction showing on a screen in the Medicaid version of a normal physical, where a doctor can consult with the patient about what to do next, we have a situation where a drug addict is refused all services... if they even get together the cash for the drug test (and the guts to take one knowing what the results will be). Without Medicaid coverage, how could an impoverished drug addict receive the necessary medical care to overcome their addiction? With the current Florida Child Family Services department condition (below poor), I don't think it'd be in the State's best interests to place so many families in a situation where children could be removed when the department simply doesn't have the manpower, funding or skills to handle the current workload.

The woman didn't have children, by the way. A step-daughter but no children of her own. I don't want to make this specifically about this one person because, honestly, she's not the only one who's made me cock my head sideways like a confused dog. A lot of people tend to change their tune when an issue hits home, and I realize this, but that doesn't change the fact that the opinion exists at all or why on earth it would change, especially for a beloved family member, if the person is so sure they are right.

I hope you don't mind handling my additional questions.

You will pay, one way or another.

Higher rates of poverty, and barriers to government assistance demonstrate a strong correlation to property crime. Higher rates of property crime lead to increases in insurance costs.

If you own your own home, you will pay through higher likelihood of your home or car being broken into and robbed. If you rent and hold a tenancy policy (if they are even still available in the city where you live) you will pay, similarly--or else you will be self-insured, and it's a roll of the dice when you will be faced with an uninsured loss.

Higher rates of poverty and barriers to government assistance demonstrate a strong correlation to educational achievement and integration within the workforce. By failing to end this cycle, you only serve to perpetuate it--creating a permanent underclass who represent a drain on productivity--which increases the pressure on those of us who are productive.

Higher rates of poverty and barriers to government assistance demonstrate a strong correlation to infectious disease. Pulmonary tuberculosis is significantly more endemic in communities with substandard access to health care. Furthermore, people in these communities are less likely to be in a position to comply with ongoing drug therapies, which is a leading cause of the development of MDR and XDR strains of M. tuberculosis.

But by all means, make your social policy choices based on your pocketbook today, rather than the impact that you will feel tomorrow.

In -A Modest Proposal- Jonathan Swift suggests we make corned beef out of the underclasses.

ruveyn