Food stamps: A case study on the need for competitive federalism

Washington Examiner ^ | April 25, 2013 | Conn Carroll

[upchuck]

...The usual refrain among Republicans is that Congress should always be looking to “return power to the states.” But as George Mason University law professor Michael Greve explains in his book, The Upside-Down Constitution, the manner in which the federal government empowers states matters.

Through “competitive federalism,” states are free to tax and regulate their own citizens as they see fit, and citizens and businesses can then move between the states. This is Greve’s Constitutional ideal.

But under “cartel federalism,” which is what most of our federalist system has degenerated into, the federal government taxes everyone and then gives grants to states to perform services as it sees fit. Greve explains just one problem with cartel federalism:

At the fiscal front, the central problem is the flood of transfer programs that encourage states to “experiment” with federal dollars. The most menacing example is Medicaid, which now consumes almost a quarter of state budgets. For the most part, this is not a result of federal coercion or mandates. It is a result of the states’ voluntary decisions to expand Medicaid so as to attract federal matching funds. The states’ perverse incentive to expand their domestic welfare state on our collective nickel—trillions of nickels—is, again, a federalism problem.

[upchuck]

Cartel federalism sucks.

[Jacquerie]

Federalism died a hundred years ago with the 17th Amendment. It took some years, but because of it, we have precisely the consolidated government our Framing generation feared.

[Travis McGee]