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Comment by ingenium | Hacker News Reader

All the federal government would have to do is threaten to cut all federal funding and subsidies to the state. An example would be funding for interstates, but there are many many more. I can't remember when exactly, but I'm pretty sure they've played this card before.

I can't think of a single state whose politicians would not back down from such a threat.

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They used the interstate funding threat to get all 50 states to toe the line on 21 year drinking age.

And yet some states are still managing to hold out against Obamacare.

In this particular case "they" equals congress, not the administration. Obama is not legally able to hold highway funding hostage to get states to implement his doomed healthcare act; He could direct congress to do the above, but they are generally too busy discussing the repeal of the ACA these days.

It would go to the SC, and since they have precedent with the Medicaid expansion, this would be likely to go in the states' favour.

You mean the federal government which has passed the least number of laws of all previous' Congresses?

I genuinely don't understand this statement as a metric for assessing effectiveness.

What you're saying is that the best way to tell whether or not the federal government is doing its job is by the simple number of laws it passes. That sounds incorrect. I don't know, maybe I don't understand that measurement, but it seems like volume is a piss-poor way to measure how well the government is operating.

It's a measure of productivity, not necessarily quality. Sure it's possible to be productive without being effective (pass a lot of shitty laws), but it's impossible to be effective without being productive (pass no laws at all), unless there is little to fix, which is most certainly not the case.

When people complain that this is the least effective Congress in history, they mean it has spent all of its time debating and posturing, rather than actually passing any laws.

In many cases I feel that Congress doing nothing is the better option. Unfortunately, when Congress acts they tend to make things worse. So a Congress that does nothing is probably about average in terms of effectiveness for me.

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