Cash-Strapped Kansas Moves to Limit ATM Withdrawals for Residents on Welfare

[Purveyor]

Tim Jones

Kansas is in trouble. After slashing income taxes in 2012, the state faces a revenue gap of more than $400 million. Republican Governor Sam Brownback and state legislators are debating how to make up the shortfall. So far they’ve agreed on one way to control how state money is spent. Starting in July, people on the dole will be limited to a single ATM withdrawal of no more than $25 per day. The law also prohibits spending public-assistance cash at movie theaters, swimming pools, and video arcades. Nail salons and tattoo parlors are out, too.

“The primary focus is to get people back to work, because that’s where the real benefit is—getting people off public assistance and back into the marketplace with the dignity and far more income there than the pittance that government gives them,” Brownback said when he signed the Kansas bill into law in April.

Kansas is among several Republican-controlled states that have recently cut or limited public-assistance funds. In Arizona, which faces a $1 billion budget shortfall, lawmakers voted on May 18 to limit welfare to a year, the shortest window in the nation. On May 5, Missouri’s Republican legislature overrode Democratic Governor Jay Nixon’s veto to enact a bill that cut thousands of low-income families from aid rolls by reducing how long people can claim cash from five years to fewer than four. Michigan’s GOP-controlled legislature passed a bill on June 2 that strips cash assistance from families with chronically truant children. “During the recession there were lots of blue states, for fiscally driven reasons, that were cutting welfare,” says Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank. “This year’s cuts feel more ideologically driven.”

“This is not a data-driven policy decision. This is a solution seeking a problem.”
Shannon Cotsoradis, president Kansas Action for Children

A September 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 73 percent of Republicans feel the government can’t afford to do much more to help the needy, compared with 32 percent of Democrats. “If you look at cycles in history, you’ll see that there is compassion, then compassion fatigue, and then blame,” says Patricia Baker, a senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, a Boston nonprofit that researches poverty. “This happens because there’s impatience with the solution.”

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-06-05/cash-strapped-kansas-moves-to-limit-atm-withdrawals-for-residents-on-welfare

[Thinkingabout]

1. I might not be smart enough to be a governor but it seems like Brownback should take his

own recommendation, reverse his tax breaks to the rich and corporations when the state was doing well. He and Jindal just don't understand if you stop the cash flow you will go broke. Pretty simple, cut the poor and give to others who needs the money.

[Jefferson23]

2. He shoud be impeached. n/t