Trashing the poor

Dana Milbank, Washington Post - Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state... Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

“I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs” with electronic benefit transfer  cards, the legislator explained, according to The Post’s Roberto A. Ferdman. “When I can’t afford it on my pay, I don’t want people on the taxpayer’s dime to afford those kinds of foods either.”

Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; they’re more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.

The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.

Last week, the Kansas legislature passed House Bill 2258, punishing the poor by limiting their cash withdrawals of welfare benefits to $25 per day and forbidding them to use their benefits “in any retail liquor store, casino, gaming establishment, jewelry store, tattoo parlor, massage parlor, body piercing parlor, spa, nail salon, lingerie shop, tobacco paraphernalia store, vapor cigarette store, psychic or fortune telling business, bail bond company, video arcade, movie theater, swimming pool, cruise ship, theme park, dog or horse racing facility, pari-mutuel facility, or sexually oriented business . .. or in any business or retail establishment where minors under age 18 are not permitted.”

A profusion of such laws has bubbled up in states across the country in the last few years, imposing punitive new conditions on the poor. Many of these are from Republican states opposed to big government, but not entirely: According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, another state that prohibits welfare funds for cruise ships is true-blue Massachusetts (though it at least touches the ocean.)

Some states have been hiking legal fees for poor defendants — in Washington state, the American Civil Liberties Union has found, such obligations average $2,540 per case — and sometimes imprisoning them for their inability to pay...

NCSL also reports that 12 states, most in the South, have passed legislation in the last three years requiring drug testing for public-assistance applicants. Florida’s law, struck down in court, required applicants to pay for the drug test, reimbursing them if they tested negative.

And what if all these new costs for the poor put them out on the street? The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty last year reported a 60 percent increase since 2011 in city-wide bans on public camping and a 43 percent increase in prohibitions on sitting or lying down in public places.

Even then, poor people can still stay on the right side of this new round of punitive laws, as long as they don’t sleep, keep moving at all times — and lay off the steak and fish.