A Shorter Matthew Yglesias

While fretting over state efforts to undermine Obama's health reform Yglesias offers this bit of wisdom:

My impression is that the quality of governance offered by state governments in the United States is generally low, and that mainly you should try to avoid handing over the administration of anything to state government unless there’s truly no other reasonable option.

Now this is a sentiment I can really get behind, but it really is much better if you just take out the word "state". Here is the edited and much improved, if I do say so myself, version:

My impression is that the quality of governance offered by...governments in the United States is generally low, and that mainly you should try to avoid handing over the administration of anything to...government unless there’s truly no other reasonable option.

It baffles me that anyone could hold such a low view of the state governments while simultaneously believing that the federal government is capable of substantially better performance. But hey, there's a lot of things I don't understand.