> This is silly - the poor are not unemployed, structurally or otherwise. To be unemployed one must be looking for work, which most American poor are not.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level. Also, if you know anything about the workings of Temporary Assistance for Need Familiies (TANF), the main federal block grant for welfare as defined under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), then you know that 1) welfare recipients must work for 24 months to continue receiving welfare, and 2) that there is a 5-year lifetime limit on being in welfare [1]. So, though your report mentions that most people below the federal poverty line, there's plenty of evidence to assume 1) those who aren't working are also not on welfare, with the possibility that 2) those who aren't looking for work have simply given up, as is the case for many, many Americans post-2008 recession.
> Your source [2] also disagrees with you.
Clarification, if anything the source disagrees with itself since the entirety of my use of it was within quotation marks. That said, I don't think it does disagree with itself. 1) We have no idea what the welfare/person spending was, as you note, so it's "silly" to assume that there were obvious net savings when we simply don't have the data. If you're not willing to trust the source on that, then at least trust the numbers for Arizona and Utah. Secondly, you say that "the actual number in Florida" was close to 2000, that 2000 people withdrew their applications when reaching the drug testing stage. You're obviously implying that they withdrew because they were on drugs and wary of not passing the test. You fail to mention the financial aspect to the drug tests--the welfare applicants themselves had to pay for the drug test according to the source you link to [2]. It was highly plausible, as noted in the article, that the ones who didn't take the test couldn't net that amount of cash.
As to Florida's program itself, it was deemed unconstitutional and stopped since it "unconstitutionally mandated searches without suspicion."[2] This was for the same reason you note that the Arizona program was "less effective"--namely because it didn't assume that just because a person was poor, they were using drugs.
I think this is feeding into a prevalent and false narrative that persons in poverty are all drug addicts or welfare queens.
Christian Parenti really sums it up well when he describes American views on poverty in his book, The Soft Cage:
"In a society that denies the true causes of poverty—low wages and structural unemployment—the poor necessarily show up as objects of mystery to be examined, measured, interrogated, and indexed, or as James C. Scott would put it, made “legible.” In a society that hides the real mechanics of exploitation and sees all social phenomena through the lens of individualism, it is assumed that the poor—their genetics, their habits, or their culture—must be the true cause of poverty."[1]
Specifically with respect to your point about drugs:
"Reports such as the National Survey of Drug Use and Health suggest drug abuse among welfare recipients is hardly widespread. Many states have tried drug testing for welfare recipients with practically nobody testing positive. In Arizona, for example, in 2012, after three years and 87,000 screenings, one person had failed a drug test. Utah's drug screening program spent $30,000 on testing and only 2.5% of recipients turned out positive for illicit drugs. Florida's program had the same results.
"In all cases, the testing -- which assumes all welfare recipients are druggies -- cost much more than the savings in welfare payments."[2]
We need to stop acting paternalistically toward the poor and, instead, treat them as people who are capable of making their own decisions.
You're not accounting for those that have given up looking for jobs. Additionally, the report mentions that children are also included in the 46.2 million people below the poverty level. Also, if you know anything about the workings of Temporary Assistance for Need Familiies (TANF), the main federal block grant for welfare as defined under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), then you know that 1) welfare recipients must work for 24 months to continue receiving welfare, and 2) that there is a 5-year lifetime limit on being in welfare [1]. So, though your report mentions that most people below the federal poverty line, there's plenty of evidence to assume 1) those who aren't working are also not on welfare, with the possibility that 2) those who aren't looking for work have simply given up, as is the case for many, many Americans post-2008 recession.
> Your source [2] also disagrees with you.
Clarification, if anything the source disagrees with itself since the entirety of my use of it was within quotation marks. That said, I don't think it does disagree with itself. 1) We have no idea what the welfare/person spending was, as you note, so it's "silly" to assume that there were obvious net savings when we simply don't have the data. If you're not willing to trust the source on that, then at least trust the numbers for Arizona and Utah. Secondly, you say that "the actual number in Florida" was close to 2000, that 2000 people withdrew their applications when reaching the drug testing stage. You're obviously implying that they withdrew because they were on drugs and wary of not passing the test. You fail to mention the financial aspect to the drug tests--the welfare applicants themselves had to pay for the drug test according to the source you link to [2]. It was highly plausible, as noted in the article, that the ones who didn't take the test couldn't net that amount of cash.
As to Florida's program itself, it was deemed unconstitutional and stopped since it "unconstitutionally mandated searches without suspicion."[2] This was for the same reason you note that the Arizona program was "less effective"--namely because it didn't assume that just because a person was poor, they were using drugs.
[1] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0258.pdf
[2] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/story...