Tennessee had nearly 30,000 people apply for welfare and was able to deny benefits to 32 of them because of their drug use and subsequent inability to complete a state-mandated rehabilitation program. In total, only 55 people took and failed the drug test. So, they did at least get 23 people to go to and complete a drug rehab program. Of course, it cost the state $11,000 for the drug tests alone, and it doesn’t look like they saved much money by denying some children’s mothers some TANF money. Who knows how much it cost the state to administer the program.
Once again, the GOP went searching for a solution to a virtually nonexistent problem that they falsely claimed was costing taxpayers their hard-earned money, and once again they wound up costing the taxpayers more money than if they had done nothing.
The important thing, though, is fairness, and it just isn’t fair for the child of a drug user to get some temporary assistance when they should be going hungry as part of some collective punishment ethic that makes sense only to conservatives.
This is exactly like disenfranchising thousands of legitimately registered-to-vote people who don’t have a state-issued photo identification card in order to prevent one hypothetical person from casting two votes instead of one. Better to make sure you’re in charge of doling out the unfairness rather than risk that someone else might do something bad.
