MADISON, WISCONSIN — In 2014, Republican legislators in Wisconsin made headlines when they advanced a bill that would force all people seeking public assistance to pass a drug screening. Critics of the measure call it punishing the poor, and they point to recent failed attempts in Florida and elsewhere to drug screen welfare recipients.
Reports out of the state are that Republicans yet again wish to tighten the screws on the working poor.
“We can’t have these poors thinking they are entitled to the pursuit of happiness, on top of their right to life and liberty, can we,” Rep. Thom Thompaulsen asked rhetorically during a recent press conference.
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Rep. Thompaulsen indicated to our reporter that this new law is “just a reflection of the Republican small government mantra” and that it’s “government so small it’ll fit inside your esophagus and down your pee-hole.” Thompaulsen insists that “it’s every taxpayers’ right to know what the moocher class is getting to eat.”
“Firstly, it’s hilarious because have you ever tried to buy expensive food items,” asked Rep. Becky Blankenship (D). “They’re expensive, right? I’m not sure which ‘poor people’ that the Republicans think are spending their hard earned money on lobsters and whatnot. Lobster and crab were once considered the food of the lower classes. Should we deny poor people access to air and water too, since they’re so poor and all,” Blankenship asked our reporter.
For some Republicans in Wisconsin, however, restricting the food choices of the poor and forcing them to take drug tests on the presumption that poor people are more likely to abuse drugs, despite there being no actual evidence of this being the case doesn’t go far enough. Thompaulsen says, “we’re going to advance a bill in the coming weeks that also forces poor people to wear big red ‘P’ letters on their chests, and expressly forbids them from smiling or ‘showing any kind of enthusiasm or joy’ while getting welfare.” The Shut Up and Look Sad Like the Poor You Are Act would force all Wisconsinites on public assistance to “appear disheveled” and “dirty” at all times, and to “stop acting all alive and stuff” when someone who is not on welfare sees them.
“What kind of message does it send to the people in this state who aren’t taking a free handout,” asked Thompaulsen, “if we let the poors just run around the state, acting as if they aren’t terrible human beings for being born into a system of economics that forces you to work your whole life in pursuit of these made up things that don’t have any intrinsic value other than what we make up for them to have at the lowest possible rung, or even falling to the lowest rung because of a changing labor market or something like that, and asking for help to keep them and their families alive, it’ll be the end of America as we know it,” Thompaulsen said.
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Rep. Thompaulsen told our reporter that “real American patriots find their magical bootstraps and yank those puppies till their arms fall off” instead of “filling out a form, waiting a couple weeks, and getting issued a pittance in an effort to keep themselves or their loved ones from starving.” He insists that “in this great Christian nation of ours, should we not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and treat the poor people like the disgusting leeches they are, just as Jesus taught us to do when he hung out with them all the time and didn’t treat them any differently than everyone else?”
“Look, at the end of the day it comes down to something really basic,” Thompaulsen told us. ” Our voters are preconditioned to never actually believe that poor people are real people. We teach them from very early on to view poor people not as the unwitting victims of circumstance, luck and other outside factors that they are, and instead as belligerent leeches, sponging off the hard work of the rest of us. So we have to keep those appearances up, and passing laws that punish people for being poor is the best way to keep casting the poor as the problem, and not the greedy guys at the top my party serves –er I mean…God Bless America!’
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