2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumWhy Democrats Are Right to Politicize Sandy
....SNIP...What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. Theyre right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies.
Funding for FEMA is something the parties wrangle over, with Republicans pushing to limit the agencys budget, and Democrats pushing back. FEMA has to fight for its share of a constricted pot of money for domestic non-entitlement spending, a pot of money that the Republicans propose to radically constrict. How radically? Romneys budget promises require shrinking domestic non-entitlement spending as a share of the economy by about two-thirds.
The Republican proposal to eviscerate this wide array of public functions is one of the underdiscussed questions of the election. Republicans have defended it using a very clever trick. They dont explain how they would allocate the massive cuts to all these programs. When President Obama explains what would happen if those cuts were allocated in an across-the-board fashion, Republicans scream bloody murder. And when any single one of those programs enters the political debate, they can deny plans to make any specific cuts: They wont cut education, they wont cut support for veterans, and so on.
The GOP is the party arguing for splurging on a long vacation at the beach rather than repairing the roof. Naturally, they want to have this argument only when its sunny and never when its raining. Theres no reason to accommodate them.
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/why-democrats-are-right-to-politicize-sandy.html
NRaleighLiberal
(60,014 posts)The ads of the coming days will pretty much write themselves. Of course, the brainwashed will be unmoved....
gateley
(62,683 posts)predictions were perfect and helped areas be better prepared. Isn't that one of the agencies the R's want to defund?
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)They want to cut everything but subsidies to oil and gas, methinks. They even want to defund the FAA! We'll all be dead.