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The Washington Post reports:
A dollar bill is a special kind of thing. You can keep it as long as you like. You can pay for things with it. No one will ever charge you a fee. No one will ask any questions about your credit history. And other people won't try to tell you that they know how to spend that dollar better than you do.
For these reasons, cash is one of the most valuable resources a poor person in the United States can possess. Yet legislators in Kansas, not trusting the poor to use their money wisely, have voted to limit how much cash that welfare beneficiaries can receive, effectively reducing their overall benefits, as well.
The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits.
Since there's a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 22 2015, @03:40PM
I have had personal experience with welfare, albeit brief. It gives me a different perspective on this meme:
Welfare as a system could function as a bridge between economic change as old industries and roles die and new ones come into being. It could help the mother with 3 kids whose husband suddenly dies of a heart attack and whose insurance claim is denied because they missed a payment (that happens a lot). It could train you with new skills, DeVry-like, or something else.
But it doesn't.
Welfare has been designed by wealthy people who have never known wont or have been suddenly cut off from their support networks. It is designed to humiliate and punish. You are required to report to a welfare center at 8am where they tell you to sit in an assigned seat that literally comes from an elementary school and sits in rows in front of a desk where an employee sits in an adult-sized chair and takes attendance every 45 minutes. If you are not in that seat when attendance is taken, you are marked absent and lose your "benefits." You are not allowed to bring a computer, phone, or other electronic device. You sit there. For hours. At 5pm they give you a bus/subway token to get home, and another to return the next morning. You are given access to the computer lab 20 minutes per day to "look for jobs." The list of "jobs" consists of telemarketing positions no one will do. At every turn the employees speak to you like you're four, and do everything they can to belittle you. It is utterly futile and counterproductive.
As such, the welfare system as it exists, or the alternative many people like to champion, to abolish it altogether, is a gateway to crime. Feel shut out and humiliated by the system? Well, fuck the system, burn it all to the ground. The resentment that engenders lodges deep, and will out.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday May 22 2015, @06:46PM
Seriously what state has that shitty welfare system? Seems like a great one for some journalist to expose and bring attention to. Although I don't think I could support a replacement system that was DeVry-like, but one that sent you off to the local community college, VoTech, trade school to actually becomes skilled would be great.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone