Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is just full of original ideas, especially where it comes to cutting the state’s budget. He has proposed limiting the amount of time people can receive welfare benefits, and he wants to drug test potential recipients to, you know, weed out abuse of the system.
For someone who’s so hot to trot about spending cuts, Walker could stand to do some research. States that have drug tested welfare applicants have found that they spend more on the drug tests than they save preventing drug users from getting benefits. Florida, Virginia, and other states proved that trying to out drug users was more costly than not trying at all.
An article in The New York Times says that in Florida, 2.6 percent of welfare applicants tested positive for drugs. Florida has an overall drug use rate of 8 percent, which means that the number of needy who use drugs is below that of their more well-off counterparts. The total cost to the state was $118,140, which turned out to be more than the state saved on their drug test law.
Think Progress talked about Virginia scrapping their drug test law before it even passed. Administering the law carried a $1.5 million price tag, but would have netted savings of a whopping $229,000. Virginia was wise to reject it.
The Star-Tribune discussed Minnesota’s drug test law, with one expert saying he didn’t believe Minnesota actually thought they were saving taxpayers money. In Minnesota, like in Florida, a lower percentage of poor people receiving welfare benefits have drug convictions, as compared with the general population. Some believe the state’s move was a punitive measure more than anything.
Generally, the people behind drug test laws say they want to assure taxpayers that their hard-earned dollars aren’t going to support some coke-addicted welfare queen who has six children, drives a Cadillac, and sits on her duff all day snorting coke, eating junk food, and watching TV. What they really want to do, though, is find a morally acceptable way to slash poor people’s benefits.
This is not all, however. According to MSNBC, a federal judge struck down Florida’s drug testing law, saying it was in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The ruling, handed down last year by U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. Scriven, said:
The court finds there is no set of circumstances under which the warrantless, suspicionless drug testing at issue in this case could be constitutionally applied.
That could apply to other drug test laws, like the one Scott Walker wants to employ. So what is he doing? He’s doing what the rest of the GOP is doing: Trying to find any way he can to punish the poor for having the audacity to be poor, and look like the little guy’s savior while doing it. As with everywhere else, this effort will fail.
H/T Opposing Views | Featured image original by Chris Rand; sign text altered by Rika Christensen. Original photo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
You might want to do some research on what happened in Florida. Before the law was struck down, it did not cost more than it saved. It cost more than it caught, but because of the drug testing provision, the amount of people who submitted to the drug test was FAR less than had applied the previous months, and went up again by quite a bit when drug testing was eliminated. Thus the actual overall cost was less than it had been before drug testing. As the law was only in place 3 months, we don’t know if people would have got clean and the numbers have increased on their own, or if the numbers of applicants would have stayed down. If the applicant numbers had stayed down, then essentially the drug testing was paying for itself and a little bit thensome. Should they be tested is a different question than did it save money, and in the case of Florida, it did save them some money in the short run.
you don’t seriously expect “angry liberal bitch” to actually look for all the facts do you? Liberals start “fact finding” with a specific end result in mind and only use data that will back the result they want,ignoring any thing that may change that end. On this issue her very first thought was “this law must go! now how can we do it?”
Sounds like Karly has some issues of her own.
hy fuckface———————— these above in that article are not facts?
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FOX “news’ does marinate lemmings such as U quite frequently
Right, the GOP is just full of facts…
The fact remains, saving money isn’t these people’s goal. They just want to make the poor people go away, so that they don’t have to hear the Republicans (who might be or have someone who is on foodstamps) bitching about having to pay their taxes on the poor (which is probably $0 after they get refund from IRS).
Blah bleh bleh bleh horseshit.
Since there is evidence that a Republican LEGISLATOR was busted for buying and using cocaine I think we should drug test them all. That would clear out the riff raff and maybe we would see an uptick in sensible legislation. In order to run for office this should be mandatory. I gaurantee Sarah Palin would park the grift bus permanently.
This is not a new idea, this a FL GOV Rick Scott recycled idea. Scott tried it here in Florida, Scott thought he was going to make a few more bucks.
Florida has just under 168,000 state employees, including just over 105,000 in the executive branch. For Rick Scott, that means nearly 170,000 new potential customers for his … sorry, his wife’s … Solantic walk-in clinics.
Scott’s scheme, which will help him turn a profit from his $70 million investment, would be genius if it weren’t so darned evil. Fresh off his plan to drug test welfare recipients in the state, compounding what for many people is an embarrassing experience, having to take public assistance, Scott planed to visit the same humiliation on state workers. You know, the ones who haven’t had a raise in four years and who are about the have their unions shredded and their pensions hollowed out by the right wing legislature.
Scott’s drug-testing program operated for about three months in 2011 before an injunction from U.S. District Judge Mary Scriven brought it to a halt over concerns it violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure.
2014, Scott has also been arguing in court for the right to drug test some 85,000 state employees (though not, it should be noted, state legislators). Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, directing a judge in Miami to oversee negotiations with a union over which state workers could be tested at random.
Scott’s push to test welfare recipients and state workers has come under suspicion because the healthcare chain he founded prior to becoming governor is in the drug-testing business. Scott’s controlling shares in the company were transferred to a trust in the name of his wife, according to the Palm Beach Post.
And let’s not forget that little matter of Medicaid Fraud our Tricky Ricky was involved in. He pled the 5th - 75 times. Scott was the CEO of Columbia/HCA, which paid $1.7 billion in fines to settle charges of Medicare fraud. The largest settlement in history at that time.
n July 1997, FBI agents raided Columbia/HCA accounting offices in seven
states, including Florida. Within days, Columbia’s board of directors
ousted Scott, but gave him a nearly $10 million severance package,
including stock shares worth $300 million and a $1 million a year consulting contract.
By the way, Rick Scott hasn’t given up on the idea, he has already cost Florida over 370,000.00 in legal fees fighting to allow him to drug test, it is an ongoing battle that he plans to win, using taxpayer money.
All the disapprobation and court decisions have not changed his decision. There must be some money in it for him somewhere, some promise to be made. “Start the drug tests and we’ll give you-“
It’s simply a talking point. He’ll institute it, make his uneducated supporters happy (there are millions here in Wisco), and then he can blame the elite dem economists when it inevitably fails. We have lots of folks in rural areas that refuse to understand they wouldn’t survive without my taxes and blame the “evil black moochers” in Milwaukee for all their problems. I mean, “we” did elect this idiot 3 times while he’s dismantled the state.
Politicians always enact laws and introduce bills for one of two primary purposes.
One is to get votes. And they strive to get votes from people who vote on the basis of emotion rather than common sense.
The second is to earn money through kickbacks from businesses, such as the company who manufactures and tests the samples taken. And they will happily have the taxpayers spend millions in tax money just so the politician can pocket the fifty thousand that the corporation “donates” to their campaign fund.
When are you people going to realize that it doesn’t matter what you want the politicians to do this time, or the next time, or the next time.
The only thing that matters is the fact that even if the bill fails “this” time, or even if it passes “this” time; in four years, they’ll try it again, and see if there are more politicians who will side with them on the next try.
You people need to get off your asses and quit voting for a new politician every four years to make your personal decisions for you, and start “telling” the politicians exactly what it is that “you, the people” want to do.
Oh, that’s right, I forgot, you people can’t do anything like that, can you?
You “have to” do exactly what the politician “tells” you to do, and if you don’t like it, well, you can just vote for someone else during the next election in four years, and “hope” that the next politician might do something that actually helps the people instead of the millionaire politician that you have elected to make your personal decisions for you.
I don’t mind them drug testing welfare applicants as long as they also test the government officials also. These are the people that make our laws and the things they do affect our lives. Don’t we want to make sure they are drug free while in office. We the People should demand drug testing for them.