New GOP Lie: Food Stamps on Cruise Ships
by Eleanor Clift
Kansas Gov. Brownback is poised to sign a bill that would, among other things, bar people on food stamps from using them on cruise ships—a fake problem.
The headlines are sensational:
Kansas bans welfare recipients for spending food stamps on cruise ships.
Kansas will make sure welfare queens can’t get their palms read on the Caribbean.
The new law awaiting Governor Sam Brownback’s signature also prohibits a long list of activities including shopping at jewelry stores, lingerie shops, video arcades, theme parks and even swimming pools.
Republican lawmakers in the Sunflower State want to make sure none of this waste would happen again.
If it even happened.
(It hasn’t.)
Think of it as the 21st century’s answer to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, who existed mainly in the minds of conservative critics.
Nobody has offered a current and/or concrete example of a person receiving TANF funds (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) using their EBT card (Electronic Benefits Transaction) aboard a cruise ship, but that hasn’t stopped the Kansas legislature from passing a law to prevent it.
A provision included in their restrictive legislation will prevent TANF recipients from withdrawing any more than $25 a day from an ATM machine.
Shannon Cotsoradis, president and CEO of Kansas Action for Children, says since most ATM machines don’t deal in $5 increments, the $25 is effectively $20, plus an 85 cents fee that TANF attaches, plus another couple dollars for the ATM fee, and the result is, “We’ve just made it harder to be poor, as if it weren’t hard enough,” she says.
The list of prohibited items reads like something out of the Legion of Decency, a now defunct Catholic organization that rated films according to their moral content.
more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/07/new-gop-lie-food-stamps-on-cruise-ships.html?via=newsletter&source=DDAfternoon
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