Are adults denied food stamps if they refuse a blood test for drugs?

No, but I was denied drugs for failing a food test. Sorry, I’m a bit nuts tonight.

Not for food stamps, that is a Federal Program. But some states have mandated drug testing for welfare. It’s a big waste of money.

Scott Walker wants to test food stamp recipients in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Attorney General filed a suit in Federal District Court to be allowed to test Food Stamp recipients.

It sounds like a fine idea, like drug testing to get a job.
In practice it’s been like pissing away money, if you’ll pardon the expression.

@Adirondackwannabe LOL Love the answer.

@zenvelo Seemingly with each passing day, to me, Scott Walker more and more closely resembles the slimy Wesley Mouche in Atlas Shrugged.

It does depend on the state.

Oddly, the party that claims to be fiscally responsible and in favor of smaller, less intrusive government is all too happy to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to add another bureaucratic hurdle just to save a few hundred dollars. In the US, we don’t do that, but a few of our states seem to forget that they are part of the US and thus have no qualms about passing laws that wind up getting swatted down by our Supreme Court.

As Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig put it:
”...experts have demonstrated over and over again that there is no benefit to testing welfare recipients for drug abuse (and there certainly is a taxpayer cost). Drug testing is strictly a punitive measure, a tax on the poor levied as a penalty for their poverty. ”

For a cautionary tale, just look to Florida. In 2011, the state passed a law requiring all welfare recipients to be tested before they received help. Applicants had to come up with the $30 to $35 for the test; only those who passed would be reimbursed.

It turned out that of the 4,086 who took the tests, only 108 — just 2.6 percent — failed, most for marijuana. That’s far below the 6 percent state average of Floridians who use drugs. (An analysis by the state showed that the drug testing requirement didn’t tamp down applications.)

A few facts:
Not only was Florida left with mud on its face; it also had a small hole in its pocket. At about $35 per test, the state had to reimburse $118,140. After deducting the “savings” from the 108 who did not receive benefits, Florida lost $45,780.

In Tennessee very few welfare recipients test positive for drugs—just 37 of 16,107 Tennessee recipients did in the second half of 2014, or a mere .2 percent.

All this noise and hoopla about drug testing food stamp recipients isn’t about weeding out drug offenders. It’s a direct and open copy of the voter fraud thing. It’s a non issue designed to give the impression that the program is swamped with dope fiends, and to cast as negative a light on recipients as can be arranged. Just as with the other non issue (voter fraud) conservatives have figured out that such transparent nonsense is actually sucked up by the one segment of the conservative base that is ballooning even faster than old white men. That segment is of course the dull witted and it’s the BIG constituency that nobody talks about, but everyone KNOWS has come to dominate conservative politics. Sooner or later, it is an issue that we’re going to be compelled to address. The fact that conservatism is a beneficiary of the dumbing down of the country provides little solace to those on the right who now find themselves lumped in with the DWs who now define modern day American conservatism. Unfortunately for those in the movement still capable of abstract thought, they are now heavily outnumbered and tragically outgunned.

@stanleybmanly As an aside, you might be interested in Bruce Bartlett’s theory on how Donald Trump will make the GOP sane again.

“Well my hope is he will in fact get the Republican nomination and that he will proceed to lose all fifty states. Because I believe that the craziness that he in fact represents, that has taken hold of the Republican Party over the last ten years, since the rise of the Tea Party, in not a winnable, a winning coalition. And it has to be completely destroyed, salt plowed into the earth. Then maybe phoenix-like, a new sane pragmatic Republican Party can arise that can in fact win the White House.”

He also made the observation that Conservatives live in a bubble and why they would hate Reagan.