Romney: Federal Disaster Relief Spending Is 'Immoral'
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.
2 comments:
It's a bit of a curious thing that he would claim that federal disaster relief is immoral, but maybe it's quite telling. Everyone is tapdancing away from his background as a Mormon, but I would think that it would have at least have some impact on his ethical bearing. But it's also a bit conflicted. The Mormon church, from what little I've ascertained, has as its tenets the practice of tithing, giving a tenth of your income to the church, as well as the idea of a beehive as a effective paradigm for societal structure. To me, taxes and government programs that enhance the needs of families are the charter of all governments, local, state and federal, as society is nothing more than a collection of families, we don't have an agenda. It doesn't seem so far afield from his church's practices..... but I guess therein lies the rub ....
You have to be a member of Romney's church.
If only he could envision making his beehive bigger -
like the size of the planet .....
But he, too, is a product of the game. The carrot on the end of the stick. There's a quote that is attributed to T. S. Eliot to the effect that poor people are in collusion with rich people's politics even to their own detriment because they, too, hope to be rich one day. I guess one could say it's the new American Dream, except its actually the old one. This country was founded by a group of wealthy white landowners who proclaimed the name of god and destiny to excuse their treatment of the indigenous people and started a war because they didn't want to pay their taxes. Don't worry about the debt, Mitt, and the rest of your fear-mongering... I'm sure you and your old boys will figure out a way around that, too... the only children you're concerned about are the ones you consider worth considering ..... and we'll be the ones to foot the bill, as we are only just worker bees.
Cogent and well reasoned analysis. I once heard a woman expound on the beehive metaphor, Utah is the beehive state after all. She said that although the LDS religion is thought of as essentially patriarchal, the beehive is actually ruled by the queens.
Forgetting about culture and theology for a second, my pragmatic side says that states would much disaster relief up far worse than the federal government ever could. And poor states like Mississippi would plain be shit out of luck.
In the America I grew up in, we knew that at certain point we all had to take care of each other, especially the weakest among us. Now here I am getting theological.
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