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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: 3, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday May 22 2015, @04:26PM
There's actually a much better solution to this, but understanding it involves knowing some of the technical details of how credit and debit cards work. In the messaging between the store and the card issuing institution, there's a field for the Merchant Category Code (MCC). It would be pretty easy to update the issuing institution's system to say "If the MCC is 7995, deny the transaction with code 57". MCC of 7995 is defined as "Services-Gambling Transactions" and response code 57 represents "Illegal transaction - violation of law". Anybody using this site is probably aware that this can just be a switch statement in C/C++ (or equivalent in any other language, even COBOL has one in EVALUATE) where a list of MCCs just results in a denial and the default is to continue processing.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.