Sympathy, but not money for disaster areas

[Ravi]

So a policy of favoritism over equality again? All to commonly heard from the Dem side... yet you complain about other companies getting breaks for whatever other reasons ... it's simple for me... equality and get the government out of the business of being a mommy, insurance company, or whatever and out of the business of inequality...

I do not support special treatment because you choose to live or conduct business in a an area, even though it continually receives more damage, gets hit by hurricanes, or whatever... if it costs you more to repair more often, then you'll have to raise your prices to deal with the money it takes to rebuild/repair... so guess what, it may then cost more to ship to New Orleans than to ship to Norfolk or wherever, and you'll have to weigh that against the time/distance savings, etc...

How would letting New Orleans keep more of the tax revenue it generates be favoritism?

You are cutting your nose off to spite your face. Having no port on the Mississippi would cost everyone in the country more money than fixing the city to be habitable.

 

[Ravi]

Here are a few, and these are just the biggies. There have been so many minor floods and hurricanes that nobody even keeps track other than to say "prone to flooding" "many floods" etc:

1721: A hurricane blew most of the structures of New Orleans down.
1849: Worst flooding ever due to a levee breach upriver
1882: "Flooding"
1927: Great Mississippi Flood
1965: Hurricane Betsy (catastrophic flooding)
1978: Extensive flooding
1995: Louisiana Flood
2004: 600,000 people evacuated for Hurrican Ivan
2005: Katrina
2008: Gustav


Honest, were you just joking when you made the incredibly ignorant remark about not knowing New Orleans has a history of flooding?

Which one of those destroyed the city?

 

[DiamondDave]

How would letting New Orleans keep more of the tax revenue it generates be favoritism?

You are cutting your nose off to spite your face. Having no port on the Mississippi would cost everyone in the country more money than fixing the city to be habitable.

Now if they decided to levy more local taxes on imports to offset the repairs, etc... great... but no favoritism federal breaks just because they are in that area... I did not understand the breaks you meant at first

And again... it is not everyone else's responsibility... if New Orleans has to raise prices directly to deal with rebuilding, and hence the prices of good coming thru there raises... so be it... that is the cost of living or doing business in that area... they can have the port there all they want, or the city, and people can choose to live there all they want... at their risk and their expense when the risk turns into an event where major money is needed to repair or rebuild

 

[AllieBaba]

Just admit you are woefully ignorant, Ravi, and we'll let this rest and try to forget it. Kibbitzing isn't going to help you at this point.

And somewhere in my explorations I read that NO had received $2 BILLION from the feds for something or other to do with flood/hurricane reconstruction. I don't think it was levee related...

 

[Ravi]

Just admit you are woefully ignorant, Ravi, and we'll let this rest and try to forget it. Kibbitzing isn't going to help you at this point.

And somewhere in my explorations I read that NO had received $2 BILLION from the feds for something or other to do with flood/hurricane reconstruction. I don't think it was levee related...

Nope, you claimed the city had been ruined or destroyed repeatedly. You don't have anything to back up your claim. Moron.

 

[Ravi]

Now if they decided to levy more local taxes on imports to offset the repairs, etc... great... but no favoritism federal breaks just because they are in that area... I did not understand the breaks you meant at first

And again... it is not everyone else's responsibility... if New Orleans has to raise prices directly to deal with rebuilding, and hence the prices of good coming thru there raises... so be it... that is the cost of living or doing business in that area... they can have the port there all they want, or the city, and people can choose to live there all they want... at their risk and their expense when the risk turns into an event where major money is needed to repair or rebuild

Except the reason New Orleans is in danger from hurricanes is because of the shipping industry...canals have been cut, the Mississippi has been rerouted...by the Federal Government...that's us, btw, and it was all done to make shipping up and down the River and through the intercoastal canal system easier than it used to be...to the benefit of the entire country.

Again, you can cut off your nose to spite your face, but at least try to get a grasp of how cities and states benefit the entire country.

 

[greenpartyaz]

Hurricane Gustav has been downgraded and is looking to spare the more densely populated areas along the Gulf Coast. How joyous it is that they will experience nothing on the scale of Katrina.

And how joyous it is that we won’t have to pay for it.

Since we dodged a bullet this time, what’s say we use the time before the next inevitable disaster to scrap a system where taxpayers shell out billions of dollars to people who build homes in high risk areas?

It's time they buckled down and got their own insurance.

Be it water, wind, tremors or fire, if people decide to live on a flood plain, a forest, a fault line or “Tornado Alley,” they should accept the risks and shoulder the cost. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which oversees assistance and cash disbursement, has been subsidizing these folks for too long.

As the Cato Institute stated in a report on FEMA:

“By using taxpayer dollars to provide disaster relief and subsidized insurance, FEMA itself encourages Americans to build in disaster-prone areas and makes the rest of us pick up the tab for those risk decisions. In a well-functioning private marketplace, individuals who chose to build houses in flood plains or hurricane zones would bear the cost of the increased risk through higher insurance premiums. FEMA's activities undermine that process...This $4 billion-a-year agency should be abolished.”

That report was from several years back. Since then the budget has ballooned to $8 billion-a-year. More money, same problem.

Another byproduct of having a federal safety net is that local governments, knowing that FEMA will come in and bail them out, spend less money shoring up potentially dangerous areas.

And FEMA is riddled with an incompetent and at times deceitful group of people.

During the 2007 California fires, FEMA actually staged its own press conference to avoid looking bad in the media. As hard as it is to fathom, Deputy Administrator Harvey E. Johnson stood at a podium taking questions from FEMA employees posing as reporters.

Real reporters were given only 15 minutes notice of the press conference --thus left with no choice but to phone in to a conference call which was set up in “listen only" mode. Fox and CNN ran a live feed as the faux-reporters tossed Johnson softballs like, “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”, along with other questions that were framed in a way to evoke positive responses.

It's not that FEMA is completely useless. There should be some kind of disaster relief fund that would feed and temporarily shelter people, but helping them rebuild their homes in the same location is Einstein's definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

With more people paying into private insurance, the price will naturally come down as the higher cash reserves allow companies to lower the rates.

And with all the money being squandered by a poorly mismanaged agency, it is time to give something else a try. There is no reason why taxpayers should chip in on rebuilding someone's summer beach house.

Bobby McGill
Idle Wordship- News & Politics

Here is a piece that is right up your alley!

Anatomy of an unnatural disaster - Salon.com