If there's one thing that conservatives can't stand, it's the thought that someone "lesser" than them is getting something that they don't deserve. With the exception of Republican politicians and corporations, they hate freeloaders. They live their lives just knowing that someone somewhere is getting a handout of someone else's hard-earned tax dollars, and it makes them livid.

That has to be the explanation. Otherwise, why would we be seeing red state after red state passing laws to require welfare recipients to take drug tests? They apparently already get irritated when someone uses food stamps and haven't sold all their belongings and reduced their clothes to rags. How dare someone still own jewelry or a cellphone and file for foodstamps? They aren't destitute if they still have something!

Florida was the test case for this new idea - the idea that they could save tons of money by flushing their welfare rolls of all those drug users. After all - if all you had to do all day was lay around the house in the lap of poverty, you'd do drugs too (yes, that says a lot about what the people passing the laws would do if they were getting welfare). Needless to say - it was a complete failure. Rather than save money by purging their welfare rolls, they instead found that only 2.6% of those tested failed the tests. The savings from being able to kick them off didn't come anywhere close to the cost of paying for all those tests.

GA and Tennessee followed suit. The results in TN were even more worthless:

So what's this all about? Wisconsin's NOW says "It’s about vilifying people" regarding similar proposed legislation in their state, and - while that is certainly part of it - I think it's racially motivated. In the mind's eye of these legislators, it's not poor white rural folks on welfare, it's inner city blacks. That perception - likely held by most Americans - just does not stand up to the reality of statistics.

For years, the number of whites and blacks on Welfare has been constistently even, with hispanics less than half of either. Also, despite the perception of the lazy unemployed "welfare queen" pumping out babies and living off the "largesse" (I almost vomited typing that) of welfare, there is a sizeable percentage of working poor, employed by money sponges like McDonalds and Wal-Mart:

So while the CEOs of these corporations enjoy massive compensation, their employees struggle and end up making ends meet via our tax dollars. It's obscene. As it is, the ~$300B we spend annually on Welfare is still only about 7.5% of the total budget. That's less than what most people think they should tithe to their church for essentially the same thing, per their prophet's teachings. Imagine if there wasn't so much income disparity? If the worker was able to keep more of their labor's worth (in pay) rather having it line the already bulging pockets of their employers, we could decrease that percentage quite a bit.

Instead of passing laws to waste precious tax dollars on drug tests, they should be passing laws to prevent another gilded age with a majority of the country living like serfs.