letterstomycountry:

A friend of mine recently posted the following tiresome message on facebook as evidence of why “states should be able to govern themselves:”

The irony of this message is that it is a better argument against states’ rights than vice versa.  But leaving states’ rights aside for a moment, I am confident that anyone who has spent two seconds examining the actual impact of welfare drug testing will discover that it’s literally one of the worst policies ever to be suggested in our body politic.  From a cost/benefit analysis standpoint, it is quite possibly one of the most inefficient, ineffective, and counterproductive policies that a governing body can implement.

Not long after drug testing was implemented in Florida, it was discovered that 98% of Florida welfare recipients passed their drug tests.  During follow-up investigation and exams, it was discovered that 96% of the testees were in-fact drug free.  That means that welfare recipients in Florida are representing drug use at a 25-50% smaller rate than the nation writ large:

According to the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, performed by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, 8.7 percent of the population nationally over age 12 uses illicit drugs. The rate was 6.3 percent for those ages 26 and up.

Furthermore, if 96% of welfare recipients are passing drug tests, it means that 96 cents out of every tax dollar spent on drug testing in Florida is wasted.

96 cents out of every tax dollar spent on drug testing in Florida is wasted.

96 cents out of every tax dollar spent on drug testing in Florida is wasted.

As the New York Times noted in April:

[A] Florida law requiring drug tests for people who seek welfare benefits resulted in no direct savings, snared few drug users and had no effect on the number of applications, according to recently released state data.

And what happens to people who fail the drug tests?  They are cut off from welfare benefits for a year.  And what then?  Will the exigencies of their circumstances generate magical bootstraps and help them find jobs?  

Not really.  The majority of people on welfare are not persistent benificiaries, meaning that in most cases, they are people who fell on hard times that needed help because they couldn’t establish income in the first place.  “[T]he biggest reasons families apply for welfare are job instability, illness, disabilities and family problems, including abuse.”  And in the wake of Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms, many states require you to seek work while receiving welfare, meaning that you cannot simply ride the dole.  If you want to stay on it, you actually have to try to get off it.  So cutting people off of welfare doesn’t actually create any new incentives to find work.  They are already required to demonstrate attempts to find employment as a condition of receiving welfare benefits in the first place.

So what happens then?  Some beg friends, family members and neighbors for help. others resort to criminal activity.  In the latter case, there’s a non-trivial chance they’ll end up in jail, where taxpayers will then pay close to $25,000 a year to pay for a former welfare-recipient’s housing, clothing, food, and healthcare, not to mention their legal representation.  Compare that to the $753 monthly TANF benefit that a family of three receives in New York.  It costs a lot more to throw somebody in prison than it does to give them public assistance.  And given the notoriously high recidivism rates in America’s prisons, a good portion of those individuals who end up in prison will cost taxpayers a great deal more than $25,000.  And much more than if they had simply been allowed to continue living on public assistance, where they’re also a lot more likely to end up becoming productive members of society again than if they get thrown in prison.

So in the end, what we are left with is a policy that wastes taxpayer money to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, at no material benefit to the taxpayers of the state.  Drug testing welfare recipients is literally cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Taxpayers in states that drug-test welfare recipients end up spending more in the long run than if they’d simply just left people to their devices, and allowed the system to work itself out.

  4:27 pm  |   June 13 2012   |  40 notes