Katrina’s Windfall

Almost every­one I’ve talked to says, ‘We’re going to move to Hous­ton.’ What I’m hear­ing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Every­one is so over­whelmed by the hospitality.
And so many of the peo­ple in the are­na here, you know, were under­priv­i­leged any­way, so this, this is work­ing very well for them. — Bar­bara Bush, Lar­ry King 2005

I’ve laid off com­ment­ing on Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na, or rather the human response to it, up until now. I sup­pose that I’ve just not real­ly had any­thing to add to the sub­ject that seemed worth typ­ing. While I’ve had a cou­ple of friends who have been affect­ed (to say the least) by it, I can’t say that I know any more about the sit­u­a­tion than any­one else who’s not direct­ly involved. My friends have no weighed in with any sort of polit­i­cal com­ments, and I don’t real­ly expect them to (when your lives under­go major changes, I think pol­i­tics take a back seat). How­ev­er, Angela and I had some dis­cus­sion last week some­time and I’ve been think­ing about the inter­ac­tion between nat­ur­al dis­as­ters and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment since; some­thing that goes beyond Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na to the larg­er con­text of how Amer­i­ca will be pre­pared to respond to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters in the future.

Although the for­mer First Lady was refer­ring the vic­tims of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na in the quote above, I think that the Repub­li­can par­ty might be in the same boat. While every­one is lament­ing on how bad things look for them, per­haps theres a sil­ver lin­ing. The true Rea­gan Repub­li­cans are in the posi­tion to reap mas­sive long-term ben­e­fits from this storm and the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tions actions after­wards. They now have a per­fect exam­ple of big gov­ern­ments fail­ure to point to and quote Reagan:

The ten scari­est words in the Eng­lish lan­guage are ‘I’m from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and I’m here to help.’

Fur­ther, they have the added ben­e­fits of being able to all but com­plete­ly ter­mi­nate fed­er­al social pro­grams. By spend­ing fed­er­al mon­eys on hur­ri­cane repair (hard­ly any­thing I’m com­plain­ing about) with­out “rais­ing tax­es1″, they can assure them­selves that these pro­grams will sim­ply die of neglect. After some­time of the pro­grams doing noth­ing from lack of funds, the Repub­li­cans can point and say that their mere exis­tence is wast­ed fed­er­al mon­ey and kill them off com­plete­ly. In our atten­tion-deficit soci­ety, it will be long since for­got­ten if these pro­grams ever did any­thing effective.

2005-10-20 Tony Auth, from WashingtonPost.com

Auth, by Tony Auth. Pub­lished on Octo­ber 20th, 2005. WashingtonPost.com

I don’t real­ly give any­one (from either par­ty) the cred­it for plan­ning this sort of thing. How­ev­er, that’s the thing with a wind­fall. You don’t plan for it, you just make use of it when it hap­pens. Sad­ly, the same impov­er­ished Amer­i­cans who are get­ting hit the hard­est from the hur­ri­cane will also suf­fer in the long run. I feel strong­ly that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has not the right, but rather the duty to help the peo­ple dur­ing times of dis­as­ter as well as in the dai­ly lives of Amer­i­cans. The gov­ern­ment should not be a web woven into our lives, but it can and should be a net through which no Amer­i­can falls through. We need to keep a close watch to ensure that the social pro­grams stay in tact, whether they are for respond­ing to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, threats on pub­lic safe­ty, or sim­ply assist­ing the Amer­i­cans who are unlucky enough to fall at the end of the curve.

10-21-2005 Update: And so it begins…

  1. Of course, no tax­es would need to be raised at all. Sim­ply doing away with the upcom­ing tax cuts set in place a cou­ple of years ago will go an extreme­ly long way in off-set­ting the cost of rebuild­ing in the after­math of the storm. Sad­ly, doing away with any future tax cut is brand­ed a tax increase. []
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By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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