Freedom Line Blog

The Heritage Foundation has a masterful indictment of Senator Harry Reid’s (D-NV) ham-handed attempt to use a FEMA budget bill to score political points.  Last week, Reid deliberately killed a House-passed continuing resolution funding FEMA for $3.5 billion while cutting $200 million in subsidies similar to the Solyndra loan fiasco.  Angry at the cuts, Reid sidelined the House bill and introduced his own with no cuts and more spending.

Yet when the Senate sensibly defeated Reid’s proposal, he chastised the chamber in a bizarre floor speech that tried to pin blame on Republicans for leaving disaster victims out in the cold.

Besides refusing responsibility for holding victims hostage so more green jobs could be subsidized, Reid’s implication was that without billions in taxpayer money, citizens would be left to fend for themselves.

As Heritage shows, Reid’s argument is simply not so.  With just a bit of calling around, the think tank found that disaster victims in Pennsylvania were being assisted by the Wyoming County United Way, the Seven Loaves Soup Kitchen and the Weinberg Regional Food Bank.  Each of these private voluntary groups reported record numbers of donations and applications to assist.

As with any disaster, everyday Americans don’t wait for the government to mobilize.  Instead, they roll up their sleeves, stuff sand bags, serve hot food and help the devastated rebuild their lives and communities.  For statists like Harry Reid, people die without the government.  For those living in the real world, it’s people – not bureaucracies – that make recovery possible.

Actually, it’s not the bureaucrats who individually are necessarily incompetent; it’s the system that causes so much rigmarole that truly idiotic mistakes get made. Whatever the reason, the truth is that private companies that consistently screw up rarely stay in business, whereas bureaucracies that screw up not only stay in business, but often add more bureaucrats to try to “correct” the problems that themselves are caused by too many hands in the pie and too many regulations being promulgated by too many people already.

What brings on all these musings? Here’s the latest: People whose entire houses have been blown away by tornadoes who nevertheless are denied FEMA aid because their houses supposedly showed “insufficient damage.” FEMA continues to make these sorts of mistakes even though “A pending lawsuit accusing FEMA of improperly denying thousands of farm workers in Texas money to repair their homes after Hurricane Dolly struck in 2008 based on the insufficient damage finding claims that FEMA used a concept called ‘deferred maintenance’ to back the rejections.”

Note, too, that it wasn’t an American establishment media outlet which outed this story; it was a British paper.  Don’t look to the MSM to question bureaucratic incompetence when the administration is Democratic.

Anyway, the question should arise: What happens if mistaken denials like this do not apply to somebody’s health, but to somebody’s life-saving surgery or life-saving drug treatment?  Hello, Obamacare.

From Mark Tapscott, Editorial Page Editor, The Washington Examiner:

Federal Emergency Management Agency deputy administrator Timothy Manning told a congressional panel [Tuesday, October 27] that his organization had spent $5 million during the last 18 months reviewing how it spent $29 billion since 2002, but still doesn’t know what it got for the money.”