Florida Welfare Drug Testing Cost Taxpayers More Money Than It Saved

July 11, 2012

I posted about this somewhat recently here. The link above, which leads to an April 2012 Miami Herald article, has some more concrete numbers to reinforce my original point: drug-testing welfare recipients is bad policy, no matter what your political angle is. To wit: as of April, Florida taxpayers have netted a loss of $45,780, not including the cost of implementing the law in the first place.

Of course, now we’re being told by proponents of the law that it was never about the money:

“It’s not about money, it’s about the drug issue,” said Rep. Jimmie Smith, R-Lecanto, who sponsored the legislation. “It’s about using every tool we have in the toolbox to fight drugs.”

…

Jackie Schutz, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said the governor agreed: The drug welfare law is about protecting children and getting parents back to work.

“It is important to ensure that people who receive TANF dollars use the cash assistance appropriately and not spend it on illegal drugs,” she said.

Yes. Because nothing protects children like cutting off their access to food and housing assistance.

This rhetoric is even more laughable given that Rick Scott himself claimed in 2010 that drug-testing Florida welfare recipients would save the state up to $77 million a year by ”[imposing] more stringent standards on non-compliance with work requirements and require drug screening for recipients.” Other proponents of the bill claimed in 2011 that Florida’s drug-testing law was not only saving money, but that ”Florida’s drug testing requirement for cash assistance could become a national model” (that outcome, of course, was somewhat stymied when a Federal judge enjoined Florida’s drug-testing program back in November, pending the outcome of an ACLU lawsuit).

So when proponents of Florida’s drug-testing tell us that this was never about saving money, they are admitting that they were full of proverbial and literal excrement back in 2010. They are, to put it none too delicately, admitting that they were lying about the program in order to get Florida taxpayers to buy into a policy that is a uniform failure, no matter which metric you choose.

8:28pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZMMjnxPA9h6W

(Notes: 43)