Ah, ah, ah, ah, pee in a cup, pee in a cup...

America is caught up in Drug Testing Fever!  That’s the answer to all our drug-related problems, you see.  Simply require everyone to submit a cup of urine in order to participate every activity imaginable.  Then people who use drugs won’t use them anymore and all our activities will be free from drug users!  Who, we suppose, will just go quietly about taking drugs during their activity-free days and not bothering the rest of us.

First stop on our whirlwind tour: Georgia, where the governor Nathan Deal just signed a law to drug test parents who seek welfare assistance.

The new law requires parents who apply for the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to pay for and pass a drug test that would cost at least $17. TANF provides temporary financial help to low-income families with children. Passing the drug test once would be a condition of eligibility to receive benefits.

Now according to Georgia’s 2003 TANF fact sheet, the average cash payout on TANF is $250/month and the maximum is $280, assuming a single mom raising two kids.  She can only get this TANF benefit if her gross monthly income is below $784.  There is a lifetime limit of four years to receive TANF payments and a component of getting TANF is participation in a “work activity” where she’d probably be drug tested anyway.  According to this Georgia State Plan FFY 2009 Changes document:

A work eligible individual is expected to participate in work activities immediately after having been approved for cash assistance. … The only exemption to the work requirement is that a single custodial parent can choose to be exempt from these work requirements if there is a child in the home under twelve months of age.

Now here’s the part Gov. Nathan Deal doesn’t want fiscally conservative Georgia voters to know about: The State of Georgia will be reimbursing the TANF recipients who paid for and passed their $17 drug test, which, by the way, actually costs about $30.  It will cost more taxpayer dollars to drug test welfare recipients than taxpayer dollars saved withholding the TANF money a single mom uses to feed her two kids when she’s scraping by on $784 a month!

On average, about 3,896 adult Georgians received TANF benefits each month in 2011. … Benefits generally fall into a range from $200 to $700. If we assumed that, like Florida, two percent of TANF beneficiaries tested positive for drugs, nearly eighty Georgians applying for TANF would be denied for at least a month until they could retest positive. In monthly savings, this would probably come out somewhere between $16,000 and $56,000 a month. …

However, the cost of testing TANF recipients every month should also be factored into the equation. … If all 3,896 potential TANF recipients were drug tested, and only 80 tested positive, the net monthly cost to taxpayers of reimbursing those who passed the drug tests would be about $114,480, nearly double the monthly savings. This does not take into account the cost of state employees to administer the drug tests, the potential costs to the state of rehabilitating drug users who hope to be able to reapply for benefits, and the increased bureaucratic costs of expanding the Department of Human Services in this manner.

Next stop, Iowa, where Republican state senator Mark Chelgren has a debate pending on a similar measure to require single moms to pee in a cup in order to feed their children.  But that wasn’t enough for Chelgren, who just introduced a new drug testing for child support measure in the Iowa Legislature.

Iowa parents who receive child support on behalf of their kids would be required to submit to drug tests as frequently as every six months under a controversial amendment to a budget bill that was laughed at and ultimately withdrawn today in the Senate.

The proposal came from Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa who said he was pushing the idea on behalf of an unidentified constituent who believed his ex was using child support money for illegal drugs.

Well, what else might the ex have been using child support money for?  Dinner and drinks?  A new outfit?  Movie tickets?  By God, we ought to create Child Support Debit Cards, where the non-custodial parent loads up funds and the custodial parent can then use the card for shopping for the kids.  Whenever the card is swiped, a text message is sent to the non-custodial parent, who can then approve or deny the purchase with a handy smartphone app!  Yes, lets give vindictive exes battling over child support the extra threat of drug testing to hold over their child’s custodial parent’s head, that’ll help. Continue reading “Drug Testing Fever… yet people still do drugs!”