Hey Mantrain, I still agree with you.

Well it's probably because of my devilish good looks. And that I'm right xx

the only problem is the "this" kind of ****s on people who didnt "get breaks" and "get" to go to college, have had to struggle for everything they have, but are still making it.

True, but they're still lucky enough to have been born into a country where such opportunities exist. It's hard for me to empathise with these hypothetical people, because my life was relatively easy (I'm not discounting all the work I've put into my education and career btw) - but I *think* that if I'd had to struggle more (let's say I had a single parent, money was tighter, and I was perhaps a member of an ethnic minority) I'd *still* want to help others to follow in my footsteps. I would recognise that I was a rare breed that could overcome such odds, and still want to help those of a similar background who may not be quite so tenacious to succeed.

But that's all theoretical, because that's not me. I can't say how I'd feel in that situation, because I haven't lived it. And living like that would be *hard*. It's an interesting point though.

i would like to introduce you to said hypothetical person... Hi! how are you? my name is Daniel.

in all seriousness though. im not saying there should be no welfare. some people DO need it. i do also think though that especially in a time like this where the economy is ****, there are huge deficits and government is looking for MORE tax money to cover their own asses, that the fraud and abuse is not something that should just be accepted as "just the way it is"

There is also no widespread fraud and abuse, just saying. There's the observation that it's possible to do these things, which leads people to assume it's being done at all time.
And yes, my mother's SS comes to about rent + 50-odd dollars a month, so I pay half the rent and she gets food stamps.

-And most importantly, welfare isn't "throwing yourself at charity", that's the food bank. The food bank you take what you're given. Welfare you pay for (or, at least, rack up a bill for) with taxes.

I agree, and when the results of the vote are tabulated you might finally realize how far up your ass your head is. Be ****ing grateful that you apparently have money to spend on luxuries. You make it sound like it's awesome to be poor. If it's so awesome, then go do it yourself.

If I'm taxed for it, I'm damn well going to collect it if I have to. It's government run unemployment insurance. But if I wasn't forced into it, maybe I'd be smart enough not to bother paying in. Or too dumb to pay in when I had the chance.

It's a mistake to think that you can or must remove all fraud from the system. Actually, you should only fight fraud until the point where stopping the fraud becomes more expensive than the fraud itself. If a few people are defrauding the system, that is probably less costly in the long run than paying someone to hunt for fraud. I wouldn't be surprised if the drug testing cost more than the money it saved catching druggies.

Very economic/efficiency way of thinking :). Just like there is an "optimal"/"efficient" amount of pollution, there probably is an optimal amount of fraud as well.

:downs:

Way to completely route the actual issue being discussed. Last time I checked we were talking about the abuse of a system funded by taxpayers, not the so called glorification of poverty. What else can you pull out of your ass? I'm curious.

Another insightful freelancer post! :downs:

I actually agree. I think the drug testing thing is kind of dumb. What I was advocating was more direction on what can be purchased with welfare benefits/ severely restricting any actual cash handed out. This does not include social security or unemployment, you payed into that you can do whatever the hell you want with it.

The problem I alluded to earlier (in that I sort of agree in principle) is that in practice where do you draw the line? It becomes very difficult to assess out of the myriad products available what is ok to buy with benefits, and what's not. A new brand of sliced ham is brought out? Is it too opulent for people on benefits?

Unless I'm missing something, it's practically unworkable.

While I agree in principle that the use of welfare money should be controlled so that it's used at peak efficiency, there's two problems that prevent that from happening in real life. First, the poor are obviously bad at managing money. Second, it creates a set of government-endorsed goods, which will bring down the quality of all products as different manufactures try to beat the price to get on this list. There are also two big ideological problems. First, the government should not be in the business of supporting one product over another. Second, restricting welfare makes the 'welfare trap' worse (Because now they can't even save up the scraps of their welfare check to get a haircut before their big interview at walmart.)

Obviously people on welfare are too broke to afford drugs

You apparently didn't notice that I also posted the original article.


It's still 98% unless of course you're making the assumption that people that didn't take the test should be counted as failing. Even if we were to assume that the 2% that didn't "complete the application process" would fail, that's still only 96%, which still makes Rick Perry look like a douche-bag (not that he didn't already).


You're correct on this matter only. I mis-read the article. I'm going to blame it on the booze & weed that I just purchased with my food stamps.

Lobster is meat, so we're okay then.

Nope, I sure didn't. However, it's still the original article (referred to in the article which you partially quoted). If you want to emphasize that only 2% failed, perhaps that would be better pointed out than incorrectly claiming that 98% pass. Last I checked, people who do not take a test do not pass. So, not wrong.

I'm not disagreeing that 96% is not a high number - but at least take 5 minutes to read the articles you post.

The 2% of people that didn't "complete the application process" weren't counted in the results (neither passing or failing). 60+% of the country didn't vote in the 2008 election. That doesn't mean that McCain didn't take 57% of my home state of Kentucky. That number is obviously the number of voters. In other words, you wouldn't include non-voters in either McCain or Obama's percentage because they didn't vote just like you wouldn't include the said 2% as passing or failing. It's nothing more than an interesting fact.

Drug tests generally aim for around 99% accuracy so I'd bet the number of welfare recipients who are actually on drugs is statistically insignificant. Oooops. Your tax dollars at work.

The only way you can say anything intelligent about the 2% who did not take the test is if you have very strong evidence that the proportion of drug users in that group differs significantly from the population.

(Hint: the way you would determine this is with a drug test.)

Yes you do. McCain did not win 57% of Kentucky, he won 22.8%. He won 57% of people who bothered to vote. This article should not have claimed that 98% of welfare recipients passed the drug test. Only 96% did. Of the two percent who did not take it, all would have to pass to make the final percentage 98%. As Jon'C points out, you can't assume that their proportion of drug users differs significantly, so the final percentage of welfare users on drugs would be neither 96% nor 98%. Regardless, that is also not correct, because the article is not about how many welfare recipients are on drugs, but instead how many passed this drug test. Which is 96%.

Also, we skew the results by taking poor would-be welfare recipients who are on drugs and imprisoning them. But I guess spending lots of money keeping them locked up is better than spending a little money giving them welfare.

BOOF (snip)

It's kind of interesting to me how in Finland the welfare debate is pretty much only about "man they're giving free money to foreigners who just use it on CRIME". In which case someone usually points out that Finns on welfare do the same thing, to which the most common answer is "well they're Finnish, the money's meant for them so they can do that". I don't know if that's better than this thing you guys have going on. But still.

We hate our own countrymen here. Our politics are entirely ineffectual, so instead of changing the law, we hate people who don't fit well into it.

No, as Jon'C points out, this reasoning is perverse and disingenuous. You can't twist the definition of a proportion to satisfy your agenda.

98% of the people who were tested, passed. Period. You can't claim that only 96% of the population passed because that is false.

I don't recall anyone saying "McCain won the state of Kentucky by acquiring 22.8% of the vote" (e.g., results). What you do hear is "McCain won the state of Kentucky by acquiring 57% of the vote". I'm not quite sure what you guys are arguing. In this case we're discussing election results, not voter turnout. In the case of welfare recipient drug tests we're discussing the percentage of people that were tested & passed or failed, not drug test turnout.


Isn't it a "given" that the 98% is taken from those that actually took the test (especially considering the fact that both article mention this)? Neither article states what you seem to be implying.

Originally posted by JM:

...how many welfare recipients are on drugs,

but instead how many passed this drug test. Which is 96%.[/quote]
Again, isn't that a given? I don't think that anyone said otherwise. Surely you guys aren't merely wasting my time debating the obvious fact that the results were only of those tested. I re-read what you guys have said several times now, thinking that something was eluding me, only to discover that you're merely pointing out the obvious.

I'm sure the 98% is closer to the truth, because I have faith that people aren't just spending all their money on drugs, but I can say (with 100% certainty) that even though 98% of them passed their drug test, I don't think we should really be arguing what this 98% number means, because if this was posted implying that this is proof that welfare recipients don't spend their money on drugs, it's not proof at all. Like I said before, drug tests are not random in most of these cases, and harder drugs take very short times to exit the system. Even if the drug test is super accurate, if you were snorting some coke the week before, it's not gonna show up.

Although, it's better to know that 98% number than to not. I'm just saying I"m not gonna take too much stock into it, given the people I've known who have passed drug tests who are definite habitual users of drugs.

And JM, I am unsure of what you are arguing here, I'm in the boat with Mentat...

Can we, as a forum, please agree to learn some probability and statistics before continuing to have these threads? I don't even mean the hard stuff like tests, just things like the differences between population parameters and sample statistics, types of samples, how to formulate valid inferences (e.g. correlation vs. causation,) types of data, how to eliminate confounding variables, point estimates vs. confidence intervals, the mean average and how it relates to mean squared error, and at least some understanding of the Central Limit Theorem w.r.t. point estimates of a sample. I'm aware that basically all of the people I disagree with regularly have never formally learned any statistics or econonics, but sometimes it's hard to not attribute their comments to malice.

It would really help me out. TIA.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Statistics

The only way we can draw conclusions about the entire population of all welfare recipients is if the 2% who declined were forcibly tested, which would give us four groups of data (volunteered and passed, volunteered and failed, declined and passed, declined and failed) which we could analyze using two-way ANOVA, Pearson's chi-squared, or some other test. Without this data, the absolute most we could say about the population is that between 96.04% and 98.04% would have passed if everybody were tested, and that's by making an incredible (and frankly dishonest) assumption that an interaction exists between declining and failing. In real life a statistician would never say that. In real life a statistician would say they don't know and they would just exclude the categorical variables that are missing data.

Please, if you walk away from this thread having learned anything, please please please let it be that you can't say anything about a population if you haven't measured it.

Yeah, but their goal was not to figure out what percentage of welfare applicants use drugs. You could figure that out with 99.9% confidence by testing just a few dozen people a month.

tbh any numbers you get out of this study are complete garbage because it suffers from selection bias, doesn't sample from any meaningful population, and at this huge sample size the results are completely dominated by the inaccuracy of the drug test (like I said earlier, there is a significant chance that ALL of their positives are false positives.) Anybody quibbling over 1-2% just doesn't ****ing get it.

Oh, for sure, completely agree.



[Edit: Misread/understood what you had said. Was going to talk about multiple imputation as a method for handling missing data, but I see your point now in that nobody can 100% say something about a population without measuring it. MI can help you get there in your sample, but obviously you cannot say for certain anything about the population since it was not really measured]

Yeah, we can't really use MI with the variables given. You can only use MI if you can make a meaningful model for the missing data in terms of the others. In this case we don't have enough data to show any correlation, so our model would just be a point estimate (our 98% pass rate.) That's silly.

You could use MI if you had more variables. e.g. suppose you have a study that looks at gender, age, education, zip code and income. If your surveyor systematically forgot to ask about income in some zip code, you could use MI with a model based on gender, age and education. That'll be better. But if your surveyors forgot to ask for income in a completely random and representative way, you're better off ignoring the missing data.