St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.
On March 15, Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee testified in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee on House File 171. Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”
House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.
The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.
Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”
This good idea got me to thinking - maybe we should go a step or two further.
I'm thinking that instead of an EBT card, recipients should be tattooed with their registration numbers, making it impossible to defraud the system by using others' cards or even multiple cards.
And I also think we should ultimately round up poor people and put them into holding centers, where they can be centrally "cared for" and their actions can be easily monitored. The expense for constructing these centers can come out of existing funds that have already been minimized for welfare use. In this way we can designate urban areas unfit for "real" Americans' use, and select them as holding centers. This program will save most taxpayers around $.0003 per year, but for the true successful Americans the amount saved will be in the hundreds of thousands.
What do you think?
