John Cole looks at the data on Florida's law requiring that welfare recipients pass a drug test. So far, the program has detected very few drug users and cost more money than it saved by knocking abusers out of the system.

Cole says that the point was never about saving money, but addressing the "somewhere, somehow, someone is unfairly getting government money" that seems to keep a lot of people up at night.

What if we could, at no taxpayer expense, have someone follow around every welfare recipient 24 hours a day and confirm that they were spending 8-10 hours per day looking for a job, and the rest of the time feeling sad about not having a job and never for a minute enjoying themselves? Would that be enough? Would we still have to fight every time we want to extend unemployment benefits while the unemployment rate is over 8%? Could we increase the benefit amount to something liveable? Or would we still want to punish these people for having the poor sense of living in a post-industrial economy that is in the middle of a prolonged depression?