Joshua Holland: How Mitt Romney Would Screw the Red States!

Mitt Romney's suggestion that emergency management is best left up to the states is not just a silly, ideologically informed bit of campaign rhetoric. It represents a radical departure from what most people think it means to be an American, a view that has been litigated in our past, and consigned to the dustbin of history, only to re-emerge in the Reagan era. While Romney has been a chameleon, with a dazzling array of ever changing positions, he has been quite consistent in one area: He and running mate Paul Ryan would turn vast swaths of our already threadbare social safety net over to the states to administer, while making deep cuts to their funding in the process. As a result, people living in "blue" and "red" states would effectively become citizens of different countries. The poor and working class in those red states would become eligible for far fewer public benefits. The disparities that exist in funding education, job training and the like would become far more pronounced. We would no longer be citizens of the United States, who happen to live an Alabama or Vermont, we would become Alabamians and Vermonters, citizens of states with very different philosophies of government. It is already the case that residents of "red states" "tend to be poorer, have less education, higher rates of uninsured. On average, they have greater problems with substance abuse, and higher levels of income inequality. These differences would broaden dramatically if more safety net programs were left up to the states. No longer would Americans enjoy the same minimum standards of health and well being, the quality of public services would vary, depending on where you live, much more than they do today.