South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer Compares Helping Poor to Feeding Stray Animals

South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, who hopes to succeed fellow Republican Mark Sanford as his state’s governor, drew a comparison between government help for poor people and “feeding stray animals” – who, he noted, “breed.”

But do they breed behind their wife’s back on the Appalachian Trail?

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting, as the Greenville News reported over the weekend. “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Bauer made the comment as part of an argument that people should lose government benefits if they fail drug tests or don’t attend parent-teacher conferences or PTA meetings.

So, let’s see, the poor are drug-addicted animals who don’t know any better.  If they and their children aren’t starved, they will just breed and exacerbate the problem.  Like stray cats, they don’t think much further than that.  Do I have that correctly, Lt. Gov. Bauer?*

Putting aside the barbaric opinions of the Lt. Gov., let’s look at the stats.  The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) codes for Employment Status as “full time”, “part time”, “unemployed”, and “other”, which includes people not in the workforce, due to disability, retirement, or not looking for work.  Unemployment is the only state benefit I can extract from NSDUH, so I can’t confirm or deny Lt. Gov. Bauer’s opinion regarding Food Stamps, WIC checks, rent assistance, etc.

A majority (54.8%) of all unemployed people have tried cannabis, as have a majority of all full time employed people (51.3%).  Of all the people combined who have tried cannabis, 61.6% of them are employed full time.

But that’s “tried cannabis” which includes that guy who tried pot once in college but never toked again.  What about the current use of cannabis this month?  According to NSDUH, this is where the difference among employment statuses shows up.  Only 6.2% of full time workers smoked pot within the past thirty days.  A greater percentage (9%) of part time workers consumed cannabis in the last month and 15.9% of the unemployed used cannabis.

How about other drugs?  Like cannabis, use of other drugs is twice as prevalent among the unemployed, with 7.5% using an illicit substance other than cannabis, compared to only 3.4% of the full-time workers.

This doesn’t really tell us anything, though.  How many of the unemployed are there due to drug testing or criminal records for drug law violations, solely for use of marijuana?  The Lt. Gov. is concerned about the expenditures for unemployment benefits and a cycle of dependence on government assistance, yet drug testing and drug records are what cause the unemployment and dependency cycle to begin with.

Imagine the uproar if someone were proposing tobacco and alcohol testing to receive state benefits.  We know tobacco use is harmful to the user and their children (if around secondhand smoke) and leads to greater health care costs for society.  We know that alcohol abuse leads to chronic unemployment.  I wonder how those stats work out in the NSDUH?

It tells me that 59.5% of the unemployed smoked cigarettes in the past thirty days, compared to only 37.5% of the full-time employed and 35.3% of the part-time employed.  It tells me 61.3% of the unemployed drank five or more alcoholic drinks (binge drinking) in the past thirty days, compared to less than half of the full-time employed (48.8%) and the part-time employed (44.3%).  So now we know when you’re broke and jobless, you’re more likely to smoke cigarettes, binge drink, and smoke pot… but it’s the pot we want to blame for “facilitating the problem”?

The idea that someone facing a drug test to keep their unemployment will stop using drugs and thereby get off the dole ignores what we know about human nature.  Since cannabis is the main drug caught in drug tests, those looking for a break from the rigors of poverty will turn to drink and other drugs (any other one, they all dissipate from the body within about a weekend) and synthetic cannabinoids that aren’t tested for.  Others will fail the tests, lose their assistance, and rather than just politely shuffling off to some back alley to die, some will steal and rob in order to survive.

To steal a line from our oppressors, What About The Children?!?  This issue really touches a nerve for me because I’m the son of an alcoholic poly-drug addict whose rent was paid by unemployment checks and whose belly was filled by Food Stamps.  Now I’m a non-drinking non-smoking drug-free daily cannabis consumer who has never taken a cent of government assistance money as an adult.  That safety net saved my parents’ marriage and my life and had Dad been punished by a drug testing policy like this, I likely would have been swept into that same cycle of addiction and dependency.

Speaking of children, does the Lt. Gov. really think possible loss of benefits for smoking a doobie is going to cause anyone to not “breed”?  You’ve already said “They don’t know any better.”  One should always be wary of politicians who want to control the reproduction of any group.* It’s left as an exercise for the reader to determine the validity of this equation:

( “They” + poverty ) / South Carolina Lt. Gov. = racism.

Someone suggested to me that his quote smacked of racism; I saw it as classism.  Tomato, tomahto…