Friday, June 17, 2016

Don't Eat the Rich. Drug Test Them.

Statistics on drug abuse by income bracket are hard to find. Oh, the lower to mid-lower income brackets have quite a bit of data, but drug abuse data on people with incomes at or above the $150,000 level are shockingly absent.

"Insufficient data" say the studies. 

Criminalization of the unemployed, the working poor, and the poorly educated is a common trend, especially in states involving conservative control. But one thing we do know from statistical sampling is that employed Americans use alcohol and drugs at a far higher rate than the unemployed.

Probably because they have more disposable income. Duh. And the more expensive the drug, the less likely the poor, the poorly educated, and the unemployed are to use it.

A bill proposed by Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin aims to partially rectify that startling lack of data on drug abuse by the rich, by introducing a bill requiring them take a drug test if they have itemized deductions of more than $150,000.
 “The benefits we give to poor people are so limited compared to what we give to the top 1%,” she said. “It’s a drop in the bucket.” “We spend $81bn on everything – everything – that you could consider a poverty program,” she explained. But just by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income, a bit of the tax code far more likely to benefit the rich than the poor, “that’s a $93bn expenditure. Just capital gains,” she added. And though her bill wouldn’t have any effect on low- and middle-income Americans, clawing back more than $100,000 in deductions from even a handful of super-wealthy recreational drug users – who would be forced to pay for their own tests – could be a much more significant revenue-raiser than testing Tanf recipients.
While we are at it, (and I'm not the first to suggest this) if the politicians wish to continue to receive public assistance from the taxpayers, they should be required to be tested for drugs as well. I mean, do they really want to be serious about the War on Drugs or not?

You're telling me these three in the video are not drugs? Oh, yeah. Some kind of really good stuff.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree that our politicians should be drug tested with great regularity.

    ReplyDelete