Ron Paul wants FEMA OUT of the disaster relief business

On Saturday, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate gave Obama a tour of the agency’s command center for the storm. The president, who was with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and his assistant for homeland security, John Brennan, told workers that “everybody here, you guys are doing a great job.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Ron Paul wants FEMA out of the disaster relief business, and claims federal disaster relief is “bad economics, bad morality, and bad constitutional law.” There is a lot of evidence to back up his claims.

FEMA's reputation for making bad situations worse is legendary, FEMA’s emergency housing program, was a massive waste of taxpayers’ money: FEMA paid out nearly a third of a billion dollars over three years for temporary housing for displaced disaster victims of the 2005 hurricane season. These housing units were also declared by FEMA to be unsuitable for housing because of formaldehyde contamination and are awaiting disposal.”

In addition to that, it took FEMA six years to figure out that it overpaid and mistakenly awarded money to victims of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma $600 million.

MSNBC reported :

“Up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA’s emergency cash assistance program-which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees-were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names…Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor’s lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Florida, at $375 a night.”

Noting these various issues, Paul hopes to pre-empt similar problems in the wake of Irene. He claims:

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960.”
There is historical evidence to support the notion that Americans were better off before the inception of programs like FEMA.

Ron paul is not the only critic of Federal response to natural disasters, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in discussions regarding earthquake aid to his own district in Virginia following the recent earthquake, said,

“There is an appropriate federal role in incidents like this….all of us know that the federal government is busy spending money it doesn’t have.”

FEMA right now is woefully underfunded. Republicans have called on the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass an annual spending measure for the Department of Homeland Security that provides a total of $3.65 billion to FEMA’s disaster relief fund -- $1 billion in emergency funding and $2.65 billion for the 2012 fiscal year. The GOP-led House approved the bill in early June.

Again Obama throws lot of talk and promises at the problem, but has yet to take any action. Obama requested $6.79 billion for FEMA in 2012, down slightly from the 2010 budget, which was $7.1 billion. But the administration has yet to submit a supplemental budget request to cover additional emergency costs, sound familiar ?

Ron Paul thinks that the best people to deal with a problem are those in the community that are impacted by the problem, not a federal government which is so far removed from the scenario that they are incapable of understanding the needs to be met, or of meeting those needs.

In 1794, when Congress estimated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from San Domingo, James Madison stood on the House floor and declared,

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents…Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”

There are much better ways to handle such things. Making people dependant on the federal government and locking them up for years of red tape and paper work for help that may not be adequate or even forthcoming is waste of money and resources. Ron Paul believes that the States and local communities could a much better job of identifying where resources are needed and allocating them more efficiently.

I agree it's worth a try. The couldn't do much worse than FEMA has done, and could save us a lot of money, as well as reduce the misery index for people who are already suffering, which should be the goal in the first place.

Thanks to : The New American and Foxnews