Drug tests for unemployment benefits approved in Texas

This is such a non-issue.

I'm just a little mad that my employer requires random pee and hair tests. I don't like the idea of them taking a chunk of heavenly locks.

 

This is a great point. The gov should be allowed to intervene into its citizens lives and enforce habits that are beneficial to themselves and the rest of the country.

Next we should ban large sodas and unheathy foods in schools, because they probably will cause obesity and other health issues. Creating more of a burden on healthy Americans and the premiums they pay for health insurance and coverage.

Assault weapons and extended clips too, because they probably make mass shootings easier to perform - And just make the country more dangerous in general, probably... If not ban, at least test or run backgrounds right? Maybe just on those who are considered "high risk" by a questionaire.

What's good for the goose...

 

And yet some of us don't believe the government should have the power to punish people for making their own decisions on what they put in their bodies. It runs afoul of the 4th and 10th amendments in a way that makes many feel uncomfortable even if they share your idea of the immorality of drug use.

I think this describes supporters of any president at no time, ever. Contrary to what AM radio might be telling you, the evil hordes of bespectacled graduate degree having urbanites and working class minorities are not trying to rob you and force your children to read Rosa Luxemburg. If anything can be said to be true, the big tent of the Democratic Party is far less ideologically disciplined than the GOP when it comes to supporting fellow party member's bad ideas.

Why do you believe that it's ok to punish a family that struggles to eat or pay rent because one of the parents smoked a joint? Failing a drug test would be as easy as having one puff offered by a friend...in a month. That's a long way from concluding that anyone who takes government benefits and can't pass a drug test is an addict spending all their money on drugs, which you have insinuated.


Drug testing discrimates more against the casual mar1juana smoker than it does say a user of MDMA, cocaine or opiates since it stays in the body far longer. This is one of the reason service members and refinery workers often use these harder drugs -- they are less likely to caught.

What a person does in their own home is their own damn business if they aren't harming anyone else and that right doesn't get diminished just because they lose their job.

Easy -- because it empowers the federal government to invade people's privacy and tell them how to live. It also might very well endanger children as it ultimately holds them accountable for the choices parents make.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a "lib." Most Americans believe in the principle of limited government, and I'm sure that many of the red-blooded Republican faithful on this board would agree. Expanding the bureaucracy to hold poor people hostage to the morality police is not any sane person's idea of good governance.

 

We should force the Texas Legislature to use drugs and see how that changes their perspective on things. There were probably a gaggle of these hypocrites getting stoned on their way to work before they cast this vote. I think power is a more dangerous drug than anything they'd prefer to force us not to take.

 

I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at.

Enforcing drug laws == receiving unemployment benefits. Linking the two is asking for trouble. It's just a terrible idea.

The public is polling nationally in favor of decriminalizing mar1juana, and two states have already done so, and doesn't include states that have decriminalized possession for personal use and medical mar1juana provisions. The war on drugs is a colossal failure, is terribly unpopular and sucks a great deal of money from taxpayers. And you advocate expanding it's enforcement from law enforcement to public welfare spheres. How is that not authoritarian in principle?

Obama is not so different that the men that held the job before him and he's beholden to the same interests. If you want a serious discussion about it, start a new thread.

I'm beginning to think you are having a different conversation than the rest of us in this thread. I don't see this is a left or right issue. I see it as a fundamentally un-American one.

It depends on what's being tested (hair, blood or urine) and individual characteristics of the person and the potency of the THC, the frequency of use, etc. If you don't cut your hair often, a hair test can find things from a really long time ago.

If it is so easy to beat, why would you advocate spending money on putting it in place?

A benevolent Big Brother is still authoritarian. No one should have to seek out private charities to do what taxpayers have already paid to provide.

The law IS changing in state legislatures, as is consensus opinion. What a person does that is illegal shouldn't have a bearing on whether they receive unemployment. What if a person is driving without insurance? Missing a child support payment? I could think of a lot of scenarios where thinking like yours can ruin other people's lives.

And my mother is a daily mar1juana user that self-medicates for severe migraines. She has no criminal record. If she were to lose her job, she'd be denied benefits AND be forced to go to rehab? My mother is not a criminal or an addict, nor should she and millions of Americans be treated like one to suit your own minority moral convictions.

Nor should anyone in a first world country have to go to a religious authority for a service that's already being provided by the government. How is that any different than encouraging starving kids in Pakistan to study at a Madrassa, or for that matter, starving Israeli kids to study in a Shas-supported yeshiva in exchange for food and shelter. Again...it's authoritarian and it presumes a world view that's highly dependent on the convictions of one's own faith, a conviction that others do not necessarily share and should not be forced to submit to in order to eat.

No it's about holding the working class hostage. It's about preventing people who are capable of work who have lost their jobs from re-entering the workforce and treating them like deadbeats because you and other moral crusaders want to judge them.

It's about giving yet more responsibilities to a bloated and overburdened bureaucracy in order to give the unemployed more hoops to jump through in order to escape poverty and to shame them a bit on the way. All from the same people that claim to hate "big" government.

The Texas Workforce Commission is there to help the unemployed get unemployment checks, help in some way to get a new job, and make sure no one is abusing the system. Enforcing drug laws and puritan morality is outside their jurisdiction. If you honestly don't understand any of the arguments of why this is a terrible idea, and how it creates more problems than it solves, you are either disingenuous or credulous.

 

Most of the people that support this are just working tax payers that are pissed because they get pee tested at work and they feel like if they are getting tested so should people taking government handouts.

I don't think the concept of good idea vs bad idea really comes into it. It's more about a feeling of fairness.

It's a good idea if somebody else has to do it and not you, kind of like non tax payers who think tax payers should pay more. It's a great idea as long as it doesn't negatively affect me.

 

I'll add this as well.

I own a small business, and I had an employee that was a hardcore pot head. It really impacted her ability to do her job, and I talked about it several times with her and she kept messing up simple things , being chronically late to important meetings, and being high out of her mind in front of clients and making my agency look very third-rate. It cost me two good clients.

So I eventually fired her. She was still eligible for unemployment here, as well she should have been. It was a system she paid into. She eventually found a better paying job a few months later, learned her lesson, moderated her THC use away from the workplace and managed to keep it.

Had my business been in Texas or Florida she would be unemployable and the burden she would be to the society she lived in would greatly outweigh the cost of the government assistance she is entitled to. Losing her job was punishment enough -- advocating a system that would prevent her from getting another one would be absolutely evil.

 

Well, that's the most reasonable thing said in support of it so far.

I would argue that pee testing in most jobs is unnecessary and intrusive and just because an employer gets away with it doesn't mean you should punish others for it. That kind of resentment ultimately paves the way to expand the boundaries of intrusion further and it negatively impacts everyone.

That's why I think no one should have to do it unless they are military, professional athletes or involved in a high risk job that warrants that kind of disclosure.

I work in advertising and music. I'm not the Houston Rockets or the US Air Force. If I drug tested, I would have a hard time finding anyone qualified to work for me!

 

Doesn't actually matter. The effect on take-home pay is the same whether the tax is paid by employers or employees. If it were paid by employees, they'd just have higher before-tax pay and the same after-tax pay.

 

Why? I AM registered to vote there.

 

What're you basing this on?

When payroll tax jumped back up from 4.2% to 6.2%, did your gross salary make a similar jump?

 

It's a theoretical result that should hold true in the long run. If the rate changes, wages probably don't adjust right away, but in the long run (i.e., at equilibrium in the labor market) wages adjust so that there's no economic difference between a tax on producers (in the labor market that's the worker) and a tax on consumers (the employer).

It's the kind of thing that's usually taught in Economics 101, since it's easiest to see with supply & demand graphs. To be a little more technical, both producers (or workers) and consumers (or employers) share the cost of the tax. The share of the tax paid by each party is determined by how elastic supply and demand are in response to price (or wage) changes, rather than by who is officially supposed to be paying the tax.

 

Your dismantling of his position left him no other choice but to turn off your microphone.