Does Mitt Romney Want to Get Rid of FEMA?
Mitt Romney indicated last year during a GOP presidential debate that he wanted to cut or even possibly privatize the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Last year, Romney’s FEMA cutting comments may not have made a tremendous effect, but now the question is coming into play and Romney doesn’t want to talk about it, Bloombergreports.
As Hurricane Sandy ravaged the nation, reporters travelling alongside Romney repeatedly asked the candidate what he would do in the instance of a natural disaster without FEMA-in fact, they asked him 14 times, according to a Washington Post report-but no answer was given.
What makes all of this even stranger, is that Romney is going around calling his campaign rally today a, “storm relief event.”
Mitt Romney argued that federal spending, for things like FEMA, should be cut and money re-appropriated to the states, where they could take care of their own disasters. Consider his statements below from a CNNdebate:
“JOHN KING: What else, Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Mo. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with [disaster], 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 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.”
Romeny says maintaining programs like FEMA, which he suggested to cut, would be immoral. What do you think and what do you think the victims of Hurricane Sandy feel?
