Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice
I remembered that A.T.M. in Venice when, in May, Kansas state legislators voted to impose nationally unprecedented and sharply punitive A.T.M. withdrawal limits on welfare recipients. A family of four can receive a maximum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars per month from state assistance in Kansas, and perhaps a comparable amount in “food stamp” funds. The money is electronically credited to a state-issued debit card. The pending A.T.M. cap, of twenty-five dollars a day, would increase the number of withdrawals required to obtain the same amount of money, with each transaction siphoning fees—one dollar to the state’s electronic-benefits contractor, in addition to a given machine’s standard fee—from public money into private bank coffers. (Even the cash-back option for point-of-sale transactions in Kansas comes with a forty-cent fee after the first two each month.) Compounding the pinch, the limit would effectively be twenty dollars, because few A.T.M.s dispense five-dollar bills.
.. Should a withdrawal cap pass muster with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the state’s electronic-benefits processor, Fidelity National Information Services—which has received incentives to keep a divisional headquarters in Kansas, and presumably has benefited handsomely from the state’s business-tax cuts—stands ready to collect the additional fees. It is hard to think of a more twisted irony than a corporate-welfare recipient being paid by a state government to oversee a single mother’s access to public-assistance funds.
.. As James Baldwin wrote (and as much research being published during this moment of historic wealth inequality demonstrates), it is expensive to be poor.