National commentators criticizing a new Kansas welfare reform law have focused mostly on what they consider to be mean-spirited and insulting restrictions on how public assistance money can be spent, but other provisions of this bill will have a far more significant impact on low-income Kansas families.

Kansas already was one of the toughest places in the country for someone to qualify for assistance, and the new law will make it even harder.

According to the Kansas Health Institute News Service, about 350 Kansas families will be dropped immediately from the state’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program when the law takes effect on July 1. That’s because they will have exceeded the new 36-month lifetime eligibility limit set in the bill. That limit previously had been 48 months.

Able-bodied parents are required to work at least 20 hours a week, apply for jobs or participate in job-training programs to stay on the TANF program. A work requirement may be acceptable, but a single parent working 20 hours at a minimum-wage job and perhaps also having to pay for child care (new mothers are expected to return to work three months after their babies are born) isn’t going to earn enough to get off of assistance.

Adults convicted of two drug felonies are banned for life from receiving food stamps. Are there no circumstances under which it might be justified for a recovering addict to receive the average Kansas food stamp benefit of $113 per month?

ATM withdrawals also will be limited to $25 a day. That means people who pay rent, utilities and other bills with cash would have to make several trips to the ATM to accumulate enough cash to pay those bills.

In addition, the bill has gained considerable attention for its list of places where assistance money can’t be spent, a list that includes sporting events, liquor stores, casinos, jewelry stores, tattoo parlors, nail salons, cruise ships, movie theaters and swimming pools, but not gun shops.

When he signed this bill last week, Gov. Brownback said the program was intended to break the “cycles of dependency” and get people back in the work force and off of public assistance. DCF officials point to the fact that 6,120 TANF recipients “reported employment” between December 2013 and December 2014. However, as previously noted, those jobs are unlikely to pay enough to make assistance unnecessary.

Nonetheless, the number of TANF recipients has declined by 14 percent since July 2014 and 63 percent since Brownback took office. State officials say that’s an indication that the programs are succeeding in making people more self-sufficient, but they have no way to track that. They know that more than 22,000 fewer Kansans are receiving assistance now than in 2011, but they don’t know if they have left TANF because they are supporting themselves, have moved in with relatives, are living in a homeless shelter or have left the state.

It’s not hard to reduce the number of people receiving public assistance. All the state has to do is make rules that are so restrictive that it forces low-income families off the rolls. What happens to those parents and children after that apparently is of less concern.