Drug testing bill is a good idea

If I were a politician - and thankfully I am not - I would jump on the bandwagon to drug test welfare recipients. The possibility of drug testing welfare recipients has boiled under the surface for quite some time but, in Missouri, the movement is gaining momentum.

A half-dozen or so bills have been introduced in the Missouri Legislature this year that would require drug testing for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

The public quite frankly is sick and tired of forking over tax dollars to support lifestyles that are illegal, non-productive and a slap in the face of the hard-working public. Many in the private sector and government jobs are required to drug test periodically and there is a valid argument that those receiving tax dollars should do the same.

The Missouri House approved just such a measure last year but it died in the Senate. This year however, most of the drug testing proposals are coming from the Senate. That may well mean that some measure could pass this year.

Our senator - Jason Crowell of Cape Girardeau - is the sponsor of one such bill. He said that TANF is designed to prepare people for jobs in the private sector and drug use by the recipients will kill those hopes of jobs. Another sponsor, Sen. Bill Stouffer puts it in plain language. He says taxpayers should not allow people to use taxpayer-funded checks to buy drugs.

And of course, he's right.

There are some severe problems with the proposals and, for that reason, I am skeptical of their success. If a recipient is tested positive for drugs and their TANF payments are ended for a period, the practical result is that we taxpayers would end up funding their families in some other way. Another problem is that no one can even estimate how much treatment funds would be required to assist those caught using drugs.

So though highly popular, there are some heavy questions that remain on these proposals.

We are a generous people and we want to provide assistance for those families truly in need. The problem of course is that government assistance has become a lifestyle for far too many and not just a temporary form of assistance.

The public is rapidly growing tired of subsidizing families from generation to generation when no apparent effort to improve is ever seen from the recipients. Free medical care, housing assistance, utility assistance, SSI, TANF and more programs than you can count are all available to those in need. Is it wrong to demand that those recipients abide by the law? The answer is clearly no.

We'll follow these proposals in the Missouri General Assembly because they are important.

The current administration in Washington will never address the core issues of why people remain on government assistance for generations. Their desire is simply to provide more aid for this population.

So it remains to the states like Missouri to ask the tough questions and demand the appropriate response.