Poverty Is Not A Gateway Drug

A federal judge has struck down an infamous Florida law, backed by Governor Rick Scott, that required regular drug tests from welfare recipients:

In this case, U.S. District Judge Mary S. Scriven rejected the notion that there is any correlation between applying for welfare and abusing drugs. “[T]here is nothing inherent to the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a ‘concrete danger’ that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use or that should drug use occur, that the lives of TANF recipients are ‘fraught with such risks of injury to others that even a momentary lapse of attention can have disastrous consequences’,” Scriven wrote. Florida’s law subjects all TANF applicants to random drug testing. While applicants must “consent” to the test through their signature, those who decline are not eligible for the program. … But as Scriven pointed out, “there is no evidence that there is greater drug use and child abuse within the population of economically disadvantaged families who participate in the TANF program.” In fact, Florida’s experience with the program suggested that welfare applicants are less likely to abuse drugs than the general public, with only two percent of applicants testing positive.

Bouie highlights the massive costs and insignificant impact of such testing regimes:

In Minnesota, more than 70,000 people are enrolled in the state’s main cash welfare program. Of those, just 2,800—or 4 percent—have felony drug convictions, compared to 1.2 percent of the overall adult population. In all likelihood, the state will lose money as it tries to identify and test these recipients. In that, it will join the dozens of states who have plowed ahead with similar proposals. In Utah, for instance, only 12 out 466 people—or 2.5 percent—showed evidence of drug use after screening, at a cost to the state of $25,000. Likewise, Florida spent more than $45,000 on testing to no avail—just 108 of the 4,086 people who took the test failed. Out of the 1,890 people screened for drugs in Oklahoma—which passed a test law in 2012—just eighty-three people tested positive, at a cost of $83,000 to the state.

One of the biggest failures is in Missouri, where the state spent $493,000 on drug testing for this fiscal year. It received 32,511 welfare applications and referred 636 for drug testing. Only twenty came back positive, although nearly two hundred people refused to comply. But even if all 200 were drug users, that still comes to more than $2,200 per positive result, which is more expensive than the median benefit in the state.

Scott has vowed to appeal, saying, “We should have a zero tolerance policy for illegal drug use in families — especially those families who struggle to make ends meet and need welfare assistance to provide for their children.” Lemieux doesn’t buy it:

Ah, yes, “zero tolerance.” So Florida has mandatory drug tests for everyone who, say, claims property taxes as a deduction against their federal income taxes, right? And people who receive agricultural subsidies? We can’t have taxpayer money subsidizing an illicit lifestyle. WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?!?!?!?!?

Update from a reader:

Don’t forget that Florida Governor Rick Scott has a strong financial interest in mandatory drug testing: He owns a company that provides the service to the state. Of course, given that he transferred the shares to his wife just before he took office, technically his wife owns it, not him. That is enough to get around Florida’s laughable conflict-of-interest laws.

Divorcing Your Family

Keli Goff wonders when it’s acceptable to cut a close relative out of your life:

January has long been considered the most popular month for divorces with many unhappy spouses ready to make a fresh start after faking it through the holidays for the sake of the kids or other family members. But what if the dysfunctional relationship in your life isn’t with your spouse, but with another family member? Is January a good time to consider divorcing a sibling, parent or other family member who makes you miserable?

While divorce is widely accepted today there remains a stigma around ending a relationship with other family members, often no matter how egregious their behavior. I was reminded of this just before the holidays when on a recent episode of Oprah Winfrey’s Lifeclass, megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes chastised two sisters who had not spoken in years. The reason for the estrangement:

one sister tried to engage in an affair with the other’s boyfriend but was caught before the relationship was consummated. The sister in question had never apologized to her sibling for this transgression. Yet for some reason Jakes seemed under the impression that having this woman out of her life was a major loss for the sister whose boyfriend the other one had tried to shag and insisted they reconcile. But the question I kept asking is: why?

Why should this woman want a person she cannot trust and has shown her no remorse or empathy to remain in her life? What benefit is there in such a relationship? Jakes insisted on the importance of blood, which seems an odd reasoning to focus on when it comes to defining what constitutes a worthwhile relationship, particularly since we live in a society in which there are plenty of strong, healthy adoptive families who do not define family along bloodlines.

A Flurry Of Pageviews

The Weather Channel’s website is taking a cue from sites like Upworthy, using click-baiting techniques to drive traffic:

The traffic monitor Alexa ranks weather.com the 28th-most visited website in the United States, above Yelp, nytimes.com, and the highest-ranking pornography site. Roughly four in five of the site’s visits come from people interested in the forecast. But for the past year or so, the website has worked to keep the forecast-checkers there for original, vaguely weather-related media. … And so, over the past year, the non-forecasting part of weather.com underwent a drastic overhaul. That section of the site is now comprised primarily of original, “shareable” content advertised with Upworthy-style headlines, which maximize traffic by attracting clicks and jibing with Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm. In 2012, according to [weather.com editor-in-chief Neil] Katz, the copy in this part of the site was roughly 80 percent wire and 20 percent original; over the past year, that ratio has been reversed, with an endless stream of wire photographs replaced by original images taken by more than 100 photographers around the world. The site’s newsroom exceeds 40 journalists, most of them hired since December 2012, from outlets including The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, and Everyday Health.

The change has been successful. The non-forecasting content on weather.com more than doubled its page views in 2013, from about 1.2 billion to about 2.5 billion, according to internal numbers. (The site still receives the vast majority of its overall page views—about 13 billion total in 2013, according to comScore, averaging 54 million unique visitors per month—from people checking the forecasts.)

Mental Health Break

Not everyone is bummed about the snowstorm:

A reader sent it in:

They may not be able to build snowmen, but no human being can hold a candle to a dog’s joy when the snow piles up. Pooches of all breeds run, eat, and toss snow as if it were money falling from the sky. Seriously, it’s wonderful just to watch another creature have that much fun. Thought you’d enjoy!

The Pull Of Peanuts And Cracker Jack

Eric Loomis wonders if sports fans will ever stop shelling out for stadium tickets:

Here are two assertions that don’t seem contestable: (1) The cost of attending most major sporting events has been rising in real terms for decades. (2) The cost of watching most major sporting events via remote technology has been plunging, especially in recent years.

As a simple matter of economics, these trends can’t both continue indefinitely. Forty years ago the average NFL ticket cost $30 in 2013 dollars: this year the average is probably over $100 when you include the cost of private seat licenses. And the cost of parking and concessions has risen even faster than ticket prices. Meanwhile a giant television with a superb picture costs in real dollars what what a 12-inch portable black and white TV that pulled in a fuzzy broadcast of two games per weekend cost a generation ago, and you can for a fairly modest price watch literally every NFL game of the season on your iPhone if you so desire.

On the other hand – people have been predicting that broadcasting sports events would kill the live gate ever since the invention of television, and pretty much precisely the opposite has happened: as more sports have become available on TV (and now through other technologies as well), the live gate for major sports events, in America at least, has continued to grow.

Obamacare Acceptance

Sargent thinks “there are scenarios under which [Republicans] might negotiate for certain types of changes to the law, in exchange for changes Dems or liberals want.” He rattles off reforms Republicans might propose:

Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation laid out the types of incremental changes Republicans might pursue. He suggested Republicans might propose various ways of relaxing Obamacare’s regulations, in keeping with conservative policy ideas, that wouldn’t destroy the law. For instance, they could propose allowing insurance sales across state lines so competition drives down prices, something liberals might be willing to accept under certain circumstances if the law’s uniform federal minimum coverage standards are kept (which could theoretically prevent the “race to the bottom” liberals fear).

Or Republicans could propose to make tax deductions available to those over 400 percent of the poverty line who do not qualify for Obamacare subsidies, helping those who see premiums go up (which Republicans have turned into a major issue) and mitigating Obamacare’s redistributive elements a bit. Or Republicans could propose relaxing the limitations on age ratings, allowing insurance companies to charge more than the current three-to-one ratio the law mandates between older and younger people.

Joshua Green agrees that Republicans should face reality:

The fact is that even if Republicans win the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2016, they won’t dare strip benefits from what, by that point, will probably be upward of 10 million people. The best they can hope for is to be able to change the law in a way that’s more amenable to conservative ideals, as Frum was counseling them to do four years ago. What changed on Jan. 1 is that the “repeal” crowd became obsolete. The new coin of the realm for conservatives is coming up with a viable-seeming alternative to Obamacare that allows for the reality that Republicans are never going to strip millions of people of their health insurance. That’s what matters now.

Drum isn’t holding his breath:

Sargent acknowledges that none of this will happen in 2014, and possibly not until after 2016 too. That’s my guess as well. And even then, there will probably be only minimal Republican appetite for dealmaking. … I’d guess that 2017 is about the earliest likely date for Republicans to give up their dream of total repeal.

Hollow History

In Honduras, tourists pay big money to see Mayan ruins – even in places where Mayans never lived:

As ancient civilizations go, the Maya is one of the most bankable – a fact not lost on the [Honduras] Ministry of Tourism. It began aggressively promoting the country’s Maya past, most notably Copán, a ruined city in the far west of the country, close to its border with Guatemala. Now a World Heritage site, Copán was the centre of a Maya kingdom for about 400 years until it was abandoned around AD 900. … It is a spectacular site, but hardly representative of Honduras’s past. Copán was an outpost; most of modern Honduras was never Maya territory and the Maya impact on the country’s history is very limited.

The most ostentatious example of this ersatz history is Maya Key, a private island a few minutes by boat from Roatán Town.

Cruise ships plying the Caribbean often dock there so that passengers can visit. Its principal attraction is a full-scale replica of parts of [World Heritage site] Copán. The “ruins” are not passed off as real but [researchers] are concerned that visitors will conclude Maya Key is a genuine part of Roatán’s history – a misconception that the tourist industry appears in little hurry to correct. As the voiceover of a promotional video made by Norwegian Cruise Line [seen above] says: “What people will remember about Maya Key is Mayan ruins – past culture and history of Mayan civilization, what you can learn about the history of Honduras back 1000 years ago.”

Copán – the genuine article, that is – was once the last stop on a tour of Maya sites known as Mundo Maya. Now the final destination is often Maya Key. Ironically, the owners of Maya Key also own the small Roatán Museum on the other side of the island, which houses artifacts telling the true history of the island. But the cruise ships don’t deliver their passengers there, and the entry fee – just $1 compared with $30 for Maya Key – tells you everything you need to know about its relative attractiveness to tourists.

Nuns vs Obamacare

On New Year’s Eve, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction (NYT) preventing the government from enforcing the ACA’s contraception requirement on a Denver nursing facility run by an order of nuns, as well as several other non-profits covered by the same Catholic insurer. The nuns argue that even signing-up for an exemption from the mandate violates their religious freedom. Jennifer Haberkorn explains the complexity of the case:

The case brought by the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged falls into an unexpected loophole in the ACA’s contraception coverage. Earlier this year, the Obama administration tried through regulations to accommodate religious-affiliated nonprofits that took issue with the requirement that employers cover contraception. It allowed groups like the Little Sisters to tell their insurance company or third-party administrator that they objected on religious grounds. The insurer or administrator would then have to provide contraceptives to the employees at no charge. The premise was that an insurer or administrator would not have the same objection to providing such products. But the catch here is that the Little Sisters’ administrator — the Christian Brothers Employee Benefits Trust — is also run by a religious order. The Christian Brothers, who joined the Little Sisters on the lawsuit, qualify as a church under employment law. And under that law, if they don’t want to provide contraception, the federal government has no recourse to force them to do so.

The government is expected to tell the Supreme Court on Friday that if the Brothers have religious objections to the mandate, they can refuse to send contraceptives to the employees with no repercussions — and therefore, the Little Sisters have no reason to bring this lawsuit. That was the government’s argument to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case. “No one will ever get contraception coverage in that context, so it’s hard to imagine they have standing, that there is a substantial burden on their religious beliefs or that there is sufficient harm to [block the policy],” said Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed briefs in support of the government’s position in similar cases. The Little Sisters say they object to even notifying their administrator to provide contraceptives, regardless of the fact that the Brothers would not comply on religious grounds. “What the Little Sisters say is we can’t sign a permission slip to give our employees something that we believe is wrong,” said Daniel Blomberg of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the nuns.

I’m sympathetic to the nuns’ religious liberty. But I honestly think that signing a permission slip for employees to make their own decision about contraception coverage – and not having to pay for it at all – is a perfectly sane compromise. Marcotte fumes:

These Catholic nonprofits that wanted an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—and got an exemption from covering their employees’ contraception needs—are now fighting the provision (that exempts them from covering their employees’ contraception needs) simply because they don’t want to have to fill out a form that states that they are exempt. Why? Because their employees need that form in order to get birth control directly from their insurers (which they need to do because their employers—these Catholic non-profits—are exempt, as they want to be).  That’s right: These groups are arguing that filling out a form is a violation of their religious freedom and that “religious freedom” means that you should have control over your employee’s health care decisions even when they happen outside of the insurance coverage you directly provide for them.

Amy Davidson also sees no grounds for the objection other than to restrict access to reproductive healthcare:

The suggestion here is that birth control has such a dirtiness to it that even the formal and financial separation of religious employers from the coverage—they don’t manage it, they don’t pay for it, even though their employees get it—is inadequate. (Purely religious institutions, like churches, have an even broader exemption.) They know about it—know, that is, that the women who work for them have choices that they would prefer they did not have. But they do have them; a Catholic charity can’t insist that the nurses or cleaning women who work for it don’t use contraceptives. (The home has sixty-seven employees.) What the religious-affiliated groups are insisting is that the women bear a heavier economic cost for the sake of their employers’ beliefs—even though the Church groups wouldn’t pay more either way. In that sense, the suit embodies the irrationally passionate objections to not only Obamacare but also women’s access to contraceptives and, more broadly, reproductive rights.

Jill Filipovic piles on:

[R]eligious liberty should end at your own nose, and not entitle you to demand that anyone within your reach adhere to your same principles. It certainly should not give any religiously affiliated organization carte blanche to argue that filling out a form is a substantial burden, and the form requirement itself is tantamount to religious discrimination. The American legal system privileges religious belief over many other kinds of deeply-held moral values, so while this line of argument wouldn’t hold up in court, it’s still worth asking: how is filling out a form a more substantial burden than, say, having to pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket for birth control, or having to travel a substantial distance and spend thousands on an abortion, or raising a child?