courseofhistory
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- Aug 7, 2012
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More out of touch hogwash from Romney:
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On Thursday, Mitt Romney unveiled the latest in a series of bad ideas for taking government duties out of Washington and hiding them in the back rooms of state capitols. Mostly, Mr. Romney wants to allow states to quietly smother social programs the federal government has run for decades. In the case of his new energy policy, he wants to give states power to bypass Washingtons caution in burrowing for oil, gas and coal on federal lands.
States, he said, could accelerate the permitting process for energy extraction, resulting in far more production than Washington has allowed. Thats probably true because many states have traditionally been poor stewards of their resources. They are far more captive than the federal government to the energy and timber interests that have long pressed for this concession and have far less oversight by government inspectors and journalists.
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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
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