In Kansas, a pending cap on A.T.M withdrawals for welfare recipients is the state legislature’s latest exhibition of scorn for low-income residents. PHOTOGRAPH BY BLOOMBERG / GETTY

As a college senior, I studied and travelled in Western Europe during the fall of 2001, following the September 11th terror attacks. The most memorable of the many political demonstrations that I witnessed was a mess of disembowelled small mammals that I found smeared and strewn on an outdoor A.T.M. in Venice. While I couldn’t piece together the details of the protesters’ objections with my shaky Italian, it made sense to me that an automated teller might ooze blood from its card slot. I’d grown up poor in Kansas—the sort of poverty that qualifies for welfare, though my proud family didn’t apply—and was the first member of my household to finish ninth grade. I’d spent a lifetime trembling at banks and in checkout lines, first with childhood caretakers and then as a young adult, over a certain question: Was there enough money in the account? To my mind that fall, the banking machine could well have just eaten a child.

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.

The withdrawal limit was inscribed in an amendment to a bill, passed earlier this spring, that made Kansas among the twenty-five states with laws restricting the use of benefit cards given to recipients of the federal government’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. In 2012, the federal government announced that states must prohibit welfare recipients from using the cards in casinos, “adult entertainment venues,” and liquor stores. Some states have expanded that list to include firearms or lottery tickets, but the Kansas law goes even further, forbidding expenditures on jewelry, tattoos, massages, spa treatments, lingerie, tobacco, movies, swimming pools, fortune telling, bail bonds, arcade games, amusement parks, and that infamous indulgence for families living under the poverty line, ocean cruises.

It was the legislature’s latest exhibition of scorn for low-income Kansans, eleven thousand of whom receive public assistance under TANF, and far more of whom rely on public schools and health programs. Since Governor Sam Brownback’s historic tax cuts in 2012—which implemented a free-market dream that he shares with two of his long-time campaign funders, Charles and David Koch, of the Wichita-based Koch Industries—Kansas’s education and health programs have seen their resources diminished. In May, at least eight public-school districts shut down their institutions early, on the heels of a 2014 State Supreme Court ruling that education allocations were unconstitutionally inadequate. State hospitals are struggling, and federal Medicaid funds for uncompensated care, which totalled forty-five million dollars this year, are at risk as long as the state continues to refuse to expand Medicaid coverage in accordance with the Affordable Care Act. To address a general budget shortfall of four hundred million dollars, a record-length legislative session dragged into June; that funding impasse was resolved with a bill that raises sales and cigarette taxes (by a hefty fifty cents per pack) while mostly preserving the business income-tax exclusion that has devastated state revenues.

Similar fiscal irresponsibility was evident in the withdrawal-fee amendment. The A.T.M. limits, originally set to take effect on July 1st, are on hold while the state Department for Children and Families addresses a federal requirement that TANF beneficiaries have adequate access to funds—more than a hundred millions dollars in Kansas’s case. 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. There are the overdraft fees, the maintenance costs of ramshackle houses and cars, the credit-card debt accrued for necessities that low wages don’t cover, the interest paid on loans for college educations. Poverty’s highest costs are often psychological ones, though, borne by the neurochemistry of stress and by sociopolitical values that equate financial failures with moral ones. Laws creating barriers between impoverished families and public assistance intended for food and shelter represent a particular form of contempt for the poor—we’ll help you, these measures suggest, but we won’t trust you with that help. And they are imposed in the pall of hypocrisy and self-interest. Emily Badger, of the Washington Post, neatly summed up the institutionalized classism that underlies the new Kansas law:

We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don’t drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don’t require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they’re pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don’t require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don’t use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.

I once worked as a development director for a Lawrence, Kansas, social-services agency that provides job training and creative outlets for disadvantaged kids. Every holiday season, the founding director of the organization took up a collection from her staff, then asked the social workers to pick a family to receive the gift, which amounted to a few hundred dollars. There was consternation on this point, because the families that most needed the money often were rife with addiction and dysfunction. Some of the staff worried that the cash would be spent on cheap gin and smokes for the parents rather than on new shoes for the kids. Perhaps instead, some suggested, we should purchase a gift card to insure that the money would buy groceries, or make a rent payment directly to the family’s landlord. I considered that they might be right. But our boss insisted that the gift be given as cash, with no strings attached. What the family did with it was their business, she said.

I recalled then the difference between how I felt, as a child, when I showed my free-lunch card at school—in line, my cheeks would burn, and I often chose to skip lunch rather than display my poverty—and how I felt, as a young adult, when I deposited need-based scholarship checks into my bank account at the beginning of college semesters. After making those deposits, every August and January for four years, I would go to what my family calls “a sit-down restaurant,” eat a big meal, and leave a big tip. By the end of the semester, I’d be living on eggs and discount-bin bread, but for the moment I had more than a thousand dollars to my name and a twenty-dollar bill in my wallet. When I paid for my meal with cash_—_“I don’t need any change,” I relished telling the waitress, whose tired look I understood well—I felt not just fed but free.