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Romney: FEMA is immoral
#1
Sketchy probably has a different tune this week than the one he was singing back in a June debate on CNN:

"KING: What else, Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut—we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…

KING: Including disaster relief, though?

ROMNEY: We cannot—we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all."
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#2
THere was so much wasted govt money with Katrina, so much bungling by the govt. The churches and private organizations did a much better job and efficient.
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#3
I'm of two minds about this. Historically, government agencies like FEMA who exist to 'help in disasters' become unwieldly self-perpetuating bureacracies that lose the very flexibility that they need to have to fulfull their missions.

However, historically, when massive disasters strike, the local resources are quickly overwhelmed and go under without external help. That is the very syndrome that FEMA is supposed to resolve.

Snip away the BS and it's a good thing to have a centralized resource that the whole country feeds into to help locales that are affected. But when the bureacracy runs the show, stupid stuff happens. That's what happened in Katrina. The bureacracy won. Local responders were overwhelmed.

FEMA was never contemplated to be a 'first responder'. The media and politicians always get that wrong.

Why is the Red Cross successful ? Not because it's a 'private organization' or 'not a government'. Because it's an intelligently run distributed organization with a reasonable amount of local flexibility.

Remake FEMA with a more flexible and smaller organization. Give them the ability to repurpose national guard units for support.
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#4
Romney's suggestion is that our poorest and most disaster prone states go it alone (LA, MS, AL, etc)
That's a horrible idea.
There is not enough money in state coffers or in the private sector OR in charity orgs to do what the federal government can do in a situation like Katrina or Sandy, happening today.
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#5
As in all things, it's how you manage it that creates effectiveness.

Romney's willingness to get rid of FEMA without any substitute infrastructure to take its place is as dangerously reactionary as his followers who cite Katrina in Internet forums as "the" example of why we don't need FEMA or something like it.
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#6
Katrina was bungled on every level from local to state to federal. With that as your sole example, there's no way to determine who should be responsible for disaster management, cause they ALL sucked.
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#7
deckeda-
Yep. Just like those TEA party knuckleheads who say "Well I would get rid of the 14th amendment ! Yeah !". And then whine when I ask them what government service they've used recently, and correct them when they claim 'none'.

Kill it ? No. Fix it ? Hell yes !
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#8
Obama's sequester plan cuts $900M from FEMA budget.

http://intermexfreemarket.blogspot.com/2...funds.html
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#9
^^ Ah, the cuts outlined last month. Another idea of Obama's that Romney The Original Thinker agrees with after the fact.
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#10
FEMA's disaster relief fund was at over 6 billion in the President's 2013 budget. That doesn't include other aid that comes through DHS.
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