Florida lawmakers, led by Republican Gov. Rick Scott, gained national media attention in 2011 for requiring recipients of programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to take drug tests before receiving benefits.
This plan, the governor argued, would save taxpayer dollars by eliminating funds from these programs being spent on drugs and simultaneously making sure poor children would not grow up in homes with drug users.
Even if this plan were successful in saving taxpayer dollars, it would nonetheless be wrong for a couple of reasons: It is a gross and unnecessary invasion of privacy, it presumes that you are guilty, requires you to prove you are innocent and does nothing to benefit the children it claims to protect.
Suppose a drug user who has children did fail the drug test his family needed him or her to pass in order for them to get fed. What happens then? It isn’t illegal to fail a drug test, so the children would likely remain in the custody of the parent who is unable to feed them until the lack of proper provisions forced government intervention.
Ultimately the effect of the law would be that drug users who have children they cannot afford to feed would have to give them up to the government. But if this is really the intended effect of the law, why not skip a step and just take the children of everyone who fails a drug test? Why should the effects of this law only apply to those who are not financially stable? After all, the inability to provide food is not the only way a drug user may neglect a child, and the government would have to pay for the child either way.
However, as ridiculous a plan as that is, the results of the legislation were perhaps even more surprising, especially to those who signed it. After the law was implemented, data showed that welfare recipients are less likely to use drugs than other members of the population.
Specifically, only 2.6 percent of welfare recipients who were subjected to random testing tested positive for drugs; the majority of them tested positive for marijuana, according to The New York Times. This is contrasted to the rate of drug use among the general population, which is estimated by U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services to be 8.7 percent.
Moreover, the program not only failed to save the government money due to the low amount of drug users who receive entitlements, but it also ended up costing the taxpayers extra funds. According to The New York Times, the amount of money it costs for the government to administer the drug test (about $30 apiece) added up to a grand total of $118,140, or $45,780 more than it would have cost to just give everyone, drug user or not, their welfare check.
Luckily this law was struck down by a federal judge on the grounds of constitutionality. However, this is not the only instance when government programs with the ideological aim of saving money ended up losing money, even in Florida.
According to a report commissioned by the group Impact Homelessness, the state of Florida has spent more money imprisoning homeless people for crimes related to homelessness (e.g. trespassing, panhandling and vagrancy) than it would have cost to open a homeless shelter capable of preventing their arrests.
The financial repercussions of imprisoning the homeless are especially prevalent in cities such as Tampa and others which have repeatedly criminalized homelessness.
The report found that arresting what Impact Homelessness classified as “frequent flyers” (specific homeless people who were arrested repeatedly for the same crimes) cost taxpayers about $15,000 per person per year for a grand total of about $5,081,680.
There are plenty of places that the government could cut spending to save taxpayer dollars. But we must be diligently skeptical when we see programs authorized under the pretenses of saving money do just the opposite. The losers in the legislation may very well be those who are too poor to help themselves.
Send your thoughts to Tim at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.
