2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumNYT: Romney's Hollow Plan: Dump It on the States
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/romneys-plan-dump-it-on-the-states.html?_r=1Dump It on the States
Published: August 24, 2012 253 Comments
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Mr. Romney has a long list of other core federal functions that he wants to dump onto the states. He has proposed offloading Medicaid and food stamps by writing a sharply reduced check to the states to take care of the health and nutrition needs of poor people. He wants to repeal health care reform and let the states design their own programs for the uninsured (or not).
He wants to turn over federal job-training programs to the states, let them design their own unemployment insurance programs and give them a bigger role in designing immigration controls. (Of course, he is strongly opposed to giving the states flexibility in their welfare programs, lest they give money to a low-income family that isnt working up to Republican standards.)
Dont be fooled by his claims that states can perform these vital functions more efficiently than Washington. They cant. Battered by the downturn, states can barely perform the core functions they have. They have been laying off teachers and school personnel by the tens of thousands, cutting services to the poor past the bone and falling far behind on needed public works.
Mr. Romney is really saying that education and safety-net programs are so low on his priority list that he doesnt care what states do with them. If a blue state wants to pay for an adequate Medicaid and food stamp program, it is free to do so. But many red states care more about low taxes, and will not pay a price, no matter how much residents suffer. Many states are likely to compete in a race to the bottom to drive the poor into other states with governments that have a more enlightened sense of their role.
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Mr. Romney wants to put these programs on the backs of state governments he knows cannot handle the load, then reduce the resources they have now. That may thrill a few die-hard opponents of government, but it could have disastrous consequences.
Jackpine Radical
(45,274 posts)It's often said among psychologists that the main difference between a Ken Lay/Bernie Madoff-style psychopath and the ordinary high PCL-R street criminal lies in their ability to delay gratification and not act on their immediate impulses.
But among .001%ers like Romney & the Koch Brothers, it's clear that the urge to grab everything is pretty overwhelming & they never read their Macchiavelli, who advised the Prince to leave the peasants enough so they wouldn't be driven to desperate acts like Jacqueries. The peasants were recognized as the goose, as it were, and the Prince was advised not to kill it in a quest for all the golden eggs at once.
These people we're dealing with are less enlightened than the evil men for whom ol' Niccolo was writing. They are smash & grab types, willing to bring the species to an end and ruin the biosphere if doing so somehow helps them pile up a little more lucre.
CBHagman
(16,968 posts)...and so they propose capping and block granting funds for programs that serve the disadvantaged. If that worked so brilliantly, why do rates of insurance coverage vary across the states, to say nothing of infant mortality?
central scrutinizer
(11,617 posts)used to be anathema to the Rs.
Zoeisright
(8,339 posts)It WILL have disastrous consequences.
Fozzledick
(3,859 posts)Heather MC
(8,084 posts)How did his plan work for Mass?