Yes, We Should Cut FEMA

[Valin]

NRO:

The agency has managed to waste truly shocking amounts of money.

Kevin D. Williamson

10/30/12

 

There are some things in politics that are as predictable as the changing seasons. When there is a high-profile act of violence involving a firearm, the ghouls at the Brady Center and their allies issue press releases while the blood is still hot on the ground, blaming the crime on the failure of Congress to comply with their policy preferences. When there is a natural disaster, Democrats are front and center, before the flood waters even have crested, with reminders that Republicans — wicked, evil Republicans — would cut FEMA funding if left to their own devices.

 

(Snip)

 

Romney did not present disaster relief vs. deficit reduction as an either/or proposition. Like most Republicans, he has argued that we might have more effective disaster relief if we moved some larger part of the responsibility to the state and local levels, and into the private sector. To put the issue in a less boneheadedly simplistic fashion, the question is not whether we: A. spend money on disaster relief or B. reduce the deficit. Rather, the questions are: Given our tenuous fiscal position, is it possible that we are spending too much money on FEMA and related programs? Is that spending maximally effective? Might we be better off decentralizing these efforts?

 

Yglesias, like many of his like-minded compatriots, presents these arguments as though they were all-or-nothing propositions. This is strange, inasmuch as they pretty clearly recognize the merits of such inquiry when coming from their own side: There are many people who believe that we spend far too much money on national security (I am among them), but only the most gap-toothed among us equate asking uncomfortable questions about military-spending priorities with abandoning national security categorically. Sometimes it makes sense to ask whether the federal government should be doing this at all. Very often it makes sense to ask, as one expects a Romney administration would, whether the federal government is going about this the right way.

 

(Snip)