Mitt Romney In GOP Debate: Shut Down Federal Disaster Agency, Send Responsibility To The States

During a CNN debate at the height of the GOP primary, Mitt Romney was asked, in the context of the Joplin disaster and FEMA’s cash crunch, whether the agency should be shuttered so that states can individually take over responsibility for disaster response.

“Absolutely,” he said. “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 the opposite question, what should we keep?”

“Including disaster relief, though?” debate moderator John King asked Romney.

“We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids,” Romney replied. “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.”

Looking past the syllogism, what should be returned to the states and privatized?

NASA, military, cancer research, EPA (no just ban it entirely), FDA?

As a supposed ‘businessman’ he’s supposed to understand efficiencies in command and resource management through centralized control. Every large business tries to coalesce control into a central structure. Having one federal EPA instead of 50 mini EPA entities seems like the more cost effective and efficient thing to do. What if we had 50 armies?

How Romney logically reconciles this I’m interested to know.