re: Trump may allow drug testing for food stamps

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Hair follicle testing used to be cost prohibitive but my understanding is that the costs have gone way down in the last couple of years.

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Urinalysis is what they're using. Say it's $10/ person to run a urinalysis (not including salary for the pee-watchers) and a state has 1.5 million on the rolls (such as my state of Georgia), your cost is roughly $15M/month or $180M per year.

The average food stamp recipient in Georgia gets $128/ month.

The program would have to "catch" roughly 120,000 offenders to break even, or just under 10% of those being tested and subsequently eliminated from the rolls.

Again, what we've seen in states trying this, the rate is more like 1% which means the states are losing tens of millions of dollars every year to enact this policy.

If the tests were free, sure, great idea. But they're not.