They tried it in florida and 96% of recipients passed…but not before the state spent $400,000 in taxpayer money with the drug testing company…that had the governors wife on its board of directors

Because of America's greatest fear, that if we do something that benefits people, we might accidently help the wrong people. People who aren't even white.

You just explained how unions fell apart, pensions stopped being a thing, schools lost funding, college education went up, and social safety nets disappeared.

I constantly come back to this quote from LBJ

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The point is not the cost. It's the cruelty.

Aaaannndd... It is also a kind of subsidy to US agribiz.

I will always upvote Supply Side Jesus. Because he pays me 20 shekels to do so.

Outstanding

Frustrating, because moderate recreational drug use is fine and occasionally even beneficial as a social lubricant or creative spur. Have a beer, smoke a joint, do a bit of LCD, it won't ruin your life.

But also, people do have real material health care needs - both physical and psychological. They need secure homes and nutritious foods and freedom from a certain degree of anxiety. A big driver of the opioid crisis wasn't simply evil pharma companies (although they certainly played their role). It was amateur athletics, construction work, factory work, and other physically strenuous jobs responsible for chronic physical pain.

Rather than providing people reasonable work schedules, protective equipment, and physical therapy for their broken bodies, we just doped them up and sent them back on the jobs. And it work! Productivity surged! For a little while! And then these people became reliant on opioids to the point where they weren't efficient workers. So they were fired and replaced with younger people who were given a new prescription of opioids to treat the next generation of chronic pain. And we did this for three generations. And now here we fucking are.

Now we've got folks in the tech sector telling their staff to start micro-dosing with LCD. We've got online hustlers who are told to stay up for days at a time continuously churning out new work product by leveraging the benefits of amphetamines. We're got sales bros and bar service workers who are expected to drink their clients under the table night after night. We've got sex workers who are expected to endure physical and psychological abuse for a paycheck. We've got IT guys jacked up on whatever the fuck is in modern energy drinks who come off it by smoking a bunch of the most potent weed on the planet.

That's modern drug use for you. Its not a means of lubricating social interactions or spurring personal creativity or taking the edge off pain. Its just a tool to get people to work past their natural limits.

Not just CA. Waymart and Laurel Highlands prisons both cost $100,000 or more per prisoner, and those are in PA

Aiding the less fortunate in society benefits everyone, same as maintaining roads or building libraries.

For decades republicans have artificially raised the bar for that aid and lowered the aid actually received, for no reason than to appeal to the crowd that thinks taxation is theft but uses modern public amenities anyway.

The rampant cutting of those benefits and handing the rights over to corporations is one of the major reasons we have a nationwide health care crisis, just for one example of how those cuts end up hurting everyone.

It cant be usury, if I call it interest.

Not only is their god all powerful and all knowing, apparently, they also beleive their god to be an idiot.