Excellent post, KF...and good to see you! Hope Mrs. KF is still doing well.
When I read the news about Romney's wanting to know why windows on airplanes wouldn't roll down, I was appalled and thought just as you did....that while it's almost unbelievable, there really is another Republican as dumb as both Palin and Bush...his name is Mitt Romney...and that's saying something, isn't it?
Here's another bit of information about Romney's stupidity to mull over:
MITT ROMNEY'S TERRIBLE HORRIBLE PLAN FOR POOR PEOPLEMitt Romney's appearance on 60 Minutes Sunday night was generally awful. Between making the asinine claim that emergency rooms provide adequate health care for the uninsured to his assertion that he could drop tax rates by 20 percent without causing harm to anyone, he just proves over and over that he's not up to the task of campaigning, much less governing.
But this little segment is as cynical and as absurd as his claim about emergency rooms. When asked specifically how he would "shrink government," his answer is that he will turn certain programs over to the states where the costs will not grow beyond the inflation rate. Here's the snippet, beginning at about one minute in:
Pelley: You would move some government programs to the states. What would they be?
Romney: Well, for instance, Medicaid is a program that’s designed to help the poor. Likewise we have housing vouchers and food stamps and these help the poor. I’d take the dollars for those programs, send them back to the states and say “You craft your programs at the state level and the way you think best to deal with those that need that kind of help in your state.”Quote:
INTERPRETATION: He would block grant Medicaid, and housing assistance dollars to the states who could then use those dollars to lower STATE taxes while providing nothing for poor people if they chose not to. The states who actually used those federal dollars to assist the poor would be limited to the inflation rate in terms of increases even if the national economy blew out again, and also would not take into account states with disasters that impact their own economic picture.
Another way of saying what he said is that too many people are dependent on the government and consider themselves victims, so he wants to craft policy to confirm that they are, in fact, victims. Never mind what the actual situation on the ground is for people. As long as the problem is a state problem, it's not Mitt's problem. And states are under no obligation to provide uniform benefits because there would be no federal requirement that they meet certain minimum standards.
Víva la John Galt!
A couple of other thoughts occurred to me as I watched this piece over again. First, Mitt Romney is the king of taking small businesses which typically have higher costs because they're small, stripping their assets and then merging them with other businesses until they're big! So it's just a tiny bit incongruous to hear him talking about "the inefficiency that’s always part of a large institution like our government."
The king of large institutions is bashing large institutions?
MORE AT THE LINK
