Saturday, December 24, 2005

Bill Moyers interviewing Grover Norquist.

I'm surprised there wasn't an explosion like when matter and anti-matter meet.

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_norquist.html

GROVER NORQUIST: And we now have 27 versions of that at the state capital level, including one in New York City. So we're taking the model of the "leave us alone" coalition from the national level to the state level as well.

BILL MOYERS: "Leave us alone?"

GROVER NORQUIST: Um-hmm. Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone. Taxpayers, don't raise my taxes. Property owners, don't restrict or limit my property. Home schoolers, let me educate my own kids. Gun owners, don't restrict my Second Amendment rights. All communities of faith, Evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, people want to practice their own religion and be left alone to raise their own kids.

.....

BILL MOYERS: But what about those real people we saw in that film, the woman who needed the health insurance, who needed the health coverage, who was going to have to take $400 out of her $800 a month salary to meet medical costs that she didn't have?

GROVER NORQUIST: I think you have to look at the total level of what government does to her in terms of the taxes that they impose on...

BILL MOYERS: She's not paying much taxes, though, at $800 a month.

GROVER NORQUIST: And she's got...well, she's paying sales tax in that state, she's paying Social Security taxes in that state.

BILL MOYERS: But aren't all of those taxes sort of the membership dues we pay for living in a cooperative and collaborative society?

GROVER NORQUIST: Well, first we have to decide what we want the government to do. What is it legitimate to require with force people to pay for? It is not charity. I mean, guys with guns will show up if you don't pay your taxes and take that money from you. And I think that we want in order to have a free society to have as little as possible done coercively.
....

BILL MOYERS: What would you do about real life situations like this? This is a story out of New Jersey, the caseworker who closed a child abuse investigation and to a mother whose son was found dead in a locked basement here on Sunday had been working on more than 100 other investigations at the same time. That's more than six times the national standard recommended by national child advocacy groups. The New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services says its field agents juggle an average of 35 cases. Why shouldn't those of us who are well off be taxed a little more to try to make a system like this work for those who have nothing at all?

GROVER NORQUIST: Because I'm not interested in saving that system. I'm interested in saving and protecting the kids that that system is supposed to help.

BILL MOYERS: How would you do it?

GROVER NORQUIST: Well, I've been active with groups, the Institute for Children and some of the pro-adoption groups in Washington, D.C. The last numbers I saw, there are about 500,000 kids in foster care, about 50,000 kids free to adopt, and more than a million parents looking to adopt. And we have state rules and federal rules that are being liberalized, but that up until this point have made it difficult for kids to get adopted. And, the rules are...the Federal government gives subsidies to state governments, institutions like that, for every kid they keep in foster care, and they lose the subsidy if they get the kid adopted. That is the wrong kind of incentive to have. Nobody should have 100 kids they're chasing after...

BILL MOYERS: This is the real world, this is the only system these people have.

GROVER NORQUIST: We need to get them out of that system and into families where they're adopted. There are more people who want to adopt than there are kids that need to be adopted. And the government is in the way of having that happen.

BILL MOYERS: But in the meantime, can we hire more caseworkers, more people, to look after these children?

GROVER NORQUIST: As we're finding out, the government isn't looking after those children, and no government can look after children the way a family could, the way parents could. Let's get those kids into real families and adopted by real families who will take care of them.


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