Compassionate conservatism...
There are some major problems with the way the feds handle disaster relief. FEMA is a spectacular failure. Yet Congress is still writing them enormous checks (52 billion for Katrina). Thr federal governments ongoing bad habit of keeping alive their failures. As Ron Paul has stated:
"there is every indication that FEMA is nothing but a bureaucratic black hole that spends money without the slightest accountability . Any federal aid should be distributed as directly as possible to local communities, rather than through wasteful middlemen like FEMA. We cannot let tragedy blind us to fiscal realities, namely the staggering budget deficits and national debt that threaten to devastate our economy.". I'm all for disaster relief. One of my best friends drives an ERV for the Red Cross. But the federal government has already shown their incompetence in the way they handle disaster relief. In the real world they would of lost their charter for their incompetence. Lets bring them up to real world standards instead of just digging our grave deeper and deeper.
I agree with Paul's idea here. We have some of the unused FEMA trailers near my town, just sitting there.
I'm not opposed to federal money going to disaster relief, it isn't even the absurdly large sums that really irritate me. It's the waste, the fact that the money isn't actually having the effect that it should, the incompetence with which it is spent. Paul's thoughts here seem very logical in the sense that the local agencies that need the supplies and money would not be as likely to waste it, by say, paying to send hundreds of trailers to sit on a hillside in the middle of nowhere in western MD.
