Kansas passes law banning food stamp receipients from pools, movie theaters

[pbrower2a]

It would make more sense for welfare recipients in Kansas to boycott any products involving the Koch family that owns Kansas politics.

Banned from using swimming pools? Some of the other stuff makes some sense (like gambling venues, sexually-rated businesses, etc...)

The purpose is not so much to promote caution in personal spending (poverty itself enforces that!) but to make poor people willing to take any job available at whatever terms.

[pbrower2a]

Movement Conservatism is cruel. Cruelty is the cause of almost all preventable evil.

[pbrower2a]

So in other words Kansas is going to spend MORE money on welfare services, since enforcing something that requires this level of micromanagement isn't going to be cheap.

Are there no bank secrecy laws?

25 dollars from an ATM?

This is going to encourage an underground economy of evasion. This is a legislative disaster. 

[pbrower2a]

No alcohol, no sexually-related entertainment, no gambling... OK. I think that we are going to see the bartering of things eligible for welfare purchases.

I can see an overt two-tier culture, an economic Apartheid, forming. Poverty is rarely a choice.    

[pbrower2a]

Little so compels thrift than does poverty.

The Koch syndicate reigns supreme in Kansas, a state that seems no longer to have much to  commend itself. After all, West Virginia is much more scenic and winters are much milder in Mississippi.

[pbrower2a]

I'm surprised that some Republican-dominated state legislatures have not decided to use relief of any kind as a bar to voting. Of course it would be discriminatory, and the US Supreme Court would likely knock it down. 

[pbrower2a]

If any Christians most needed to re-read the Sermon on the Mount -- it is American Christians.

It would expose almost everything wrong with American economics.

[pbrower2a]

Honest pay for honest work is far better than welfare. When the former is unavailable, then welfare can be the difference between having a chance to get back on one's feet or end up dead or peonized.

The draconian law shows what is worst in America -- callow treatment of those that the American economy leaves behind. Poor people are not at fault for a plight made theirs in legislatures and corporate boardrooms.

An economic Apartheid will do great harm to children.   

[pbrower2a]

I agree with everything in your post, King, except there's an element of moral hazard that comes in if children or other dependents are involved.

Yeah, if you are giving money to an addict or a compulsive gambler, you are contributing to a problem.  That doesn't mean "solutions" like this do any good or aren't worse than the problem.

Limits on welfare benefits themselves force some rational thrift even if people are stuck on welfare. Choices can include denying oneself expensive tiers of cable television, cooking from scratch instead of buying processed foods, being a late adapter of technology and fads, not buying on impulse, avoiding junk foods (especially alcohol!), and not smoking... Healthy habits may require some discipline and imagination, but they are inexpensive.

I almost think that the welfare system encourages people to gorge on questionable foods and get fat on them, to get crippled from obesity so that one can never get a job, and die young. Maybe the poor need to go to the swimming pool! Maybe poor people would be better off with tablets instead of televisions... of course with Wi-Fi in housing projects.  But even those tablets cost something. But just think of what is accessible on those tablets. The Great Books!

I may have little sympathy for malingerers who do nothing to improve their lives (indeed I know some such people!) -- but don't punish their children! What signal does that give, except that America is hostile to people on the outside looking in to sybaritic excess of a Master Class that shows no empathy to any but themselves? There will always be some radical or extremist cause looking for the opportunity to exploit legitimate resentments of the disadvantaged and the guilty feelings of somewhat-privileged people with conscience.