Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Disasters and Politics

by Paul Krugman
October 31, 2012, 12:41 pm

So, the good news is that we’re no longer trapped — the power line is still across our driveway, but the power is off. The bad news is that something — weather? — has made my fragile link to the web from home even iffier. I’m out right now, and able to blog, but only briefly.

So let me just take a moment to flag an issue others have been writing about: the weird Republican obsession with killing FEMA. Kevin Drum [ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/10/fema-case-study-difference-between-democrats-and-republicans ] has the goods: they just keep doing it. George Bush the elder turned the agency into a dumping ground for hacks, with bad results; Clinton revived the agency; Bush the younger ruined it again; Obama revived it again; and Romney — with everyone still remembering Brownie and Katrina! — said that he wants to block-grant and privatize it. (And as far as I can tell, even TV news isn’t letting him Etch-A-Sketch the comment away).

There’s something pathological here. It’s really hard to think of a public service less likely to be suitable for privatization, and given the massive inequality of impacts by state, it really really isn’t block-grantable. Does the right somehow imagine that only Those People need disaster relief? Is the whole idea of helping people as opposed to hurting them just anathema?

It’s a bit of a mystery, calling more for psychological inquiry than policy analysis. But something is going on here.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/disasters-and-politics/ [with comments]