Thread: Welfare & Drug Testing

Okay, this is what I suspected. The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank whose main activities are advocating for reductions in government social spending. I'm not saying that means they are liars, but I can't take those numbers ($800B, $10,000 per family, etc.) seriously until I see them from a less partisan and biased source. The Heritage Foundation has a vested interest in overstating the costs here. Also, the link you provided is only the Heritage Foundation's front page, I would like to see the actual article.

As for drug dealers using their drug money to feeding themselves and their families instead of having the taxpayers do it.... I guess it's undesirable, but how much of a fiscal burden is really imposed by welfare payments to people who don't need the money because they have a drug dealer in the family who could support them with his drug money? I suspect this fiscal burden is comparatively low. And it also would not be alleviated by your proposal to make welfare benefits contingent on drug tests. In order to alleviate this burden, you would a test to find out whether someone has a successful drug dealer in their family, not whether they are doing drugs themselves.

EDIT: Found the actual article, http://www.heritage.org/research/welfare/wm2287.cfm. It's conclusions seem pretty shaky to me, and your OP was not honest about the issue as it's described in the article. Even accepting the Heritage Foundation's research at face value, they don't say that welfare costs will increase by $800 billion over the next ten years, they say that welfare costs will increase by $800 billion over the next ten years IF currently temporary changes are made permanent. And they provide no reason to believe that these changes will be made permanent, they just say that "history suggests" they will (read: "We want to trash-talk the Democrats so we need some justification for assuming the worst as if it was a given"). They call these "hidden costs" but the reality is that these costs don't exist yet, and the Heritage Foundation is just assuming that Obama/Congress will eventually take the steps needed for these costs to exist at some point in the future.