David Michael Miller
Gov. Scott Walker, who went out of his way to turn down $65 million in federal Medicaid dollars to expand health care coverage for Wisconsin’s working poor, is now leading a group of 11 Republican governors who want Congress to allow them to drug-test food stamp recipients.
Apparently, Republicans are so concerned that impoverished drug addicts are a burden on the state, they’ve decided to turn them into hungry, desperate drug addicts.
We already know that drug-testing people who get Temporary Assistance to Needy Families is a bust. ThinkProgress reports that, in the seven states that spent a total of $1 million to drug-test TANF recipients, the positive test rates in all but one were below 1%, and all of them were below the national drug use rate.
But policy outcomes are not the point.
Like voter ID, drug-testing food stamp recipients is a policy with certain unsavory racial overtones.
Gene Alday, a Republican member of the Mississippi state legislature, had to apologize a couple of years ago after he made some candid remarks on the subject to a local newspaper reporter.
“I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks,’” Alday told the Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi. “They don’t work.”
That’s the stereotype that drives mean-spirited policies like drug-testing food stamp recipients, which Walker wrapped together with a job training requirement in his last state budget.
These measures might be popular with white racist voters, but as policy they are based on beliefs that are just plain wrong.
For starters, most food stamp recipients are white. According to the Department of Agriculture, 40% of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients are white, 25% are black, and 10% are Latino.
So much for “all the blacks” getting food stamps, skipping work and selling government benefits to buy drugs.
The typical food stamp recipient in Wisconsin is a poor, white working mom.
Also, contrary to the Wississippi point of view, more white people than black people use illegal drugs.
Whites are more likely than African Americans to have used cocaine, marijuana and LSD — even though African Americans are far more likely to go to prison for drug offenses, thanks to the same get-tough mentality that automatically views poor people and poor black people in particular as criminal suspects.
The racial gap in drug use is huge — and exactly the opposite of the racist stereotype: Nearly 20% of whites have used cocaine, compared with 10% of blacks and Latinos, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. More whites have also tried hallucinogens, marijuana, pain killers like oxycodone and stimulants like methamphetamine.
But the most outrageous part of Walker’s punitive approach to economic hardship and hunger is how it compares to his record on actually doing something to boost the economy of our state and create jobs.
Back when Walker was pushing his new state budget, his office created a PowerPoint presentation called “From Dependence to Independence — Entitlement Reform in Wisconsin.”
It could have been titled “How Food and Medical Care Make the Poor Lazy.”
In addition to limiting access to Medicaid, Walker instituted mandatory job training for people who need food aid.
The job training piece is a particularly cruel joke, given Walker’s terrible job creation record. Thirty-one states have better job creation records than Wisconsin. Still, our Legislature passed a budget that siphons millions into job training for nonexistent jobs. Now the state is fighting to spend millions more on drug testing to root out people who might be getting high while going hungry.
Contrast that with the treatment our governor gives the businesses that received economic development grants and loans for so-called job creation efforts that haven’t yielded any jobs.
Walker’s letter urging Congress to let him drug-test food stamp recipients went to Rep. Robert Aderholt, chair of the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee that administers SNAP.
Aderholt, a Republican from Mississippi, is a Walker ally. He introduced a bill in Congress earlier this year that would allow states to drug-test SNAP recipients, arguing that his measure would save money, since the cost of drug testing would be made up by kicking people who failed the tests off food stamps.
Republicans are on a roll — showing their “fiscal responsibility” by withholding food aid from the very poor, and getting themselves re-elected by withholding the vote from low-income people and people of color through voter ID, as our own Rep. Glenn Grothman indelicately admitted recently.
“I think photo ID is gonna make a little bit of a difference...,” Grothman said.
That is, unless the people who are on the losing end of these nasty Republican policies get so outraged they jump through hoops and vote the bastards out.
Ruth Conniff is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
