Saw a film of the poor area of NOLA yesterday. Block after block ,for miles ,unrepaired and destroyed homes. It could be they believe they are going home. I do not think it is going to happen.
I don’t know why, but I’m not surprised by the facts reported in the OP.
Katrina wa a natural disaster of unprecedented scale and I believe requires an unprecedented response. To see all those house damaged as they are unoccupied with the idea of never getting rebuilt galls me.
Two things
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It appears a lot of owners are just abandoning their houses.
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It also appears that a lot of evacuees were renting before Katrina.
Why can’t the federal government buy back these properties, mostly from the banks I would guess, with cents on the dollar and employ both contractors and evacuees in temporary housing to rebuild ? When neighbourhoods are restored, the employed evacuees could buy into the homes with reduced mortgages or temporary rent from a federal agency. I know this sounds too simple and requires more thought but I think in the long run this is the only exit strategy for the taxpayer without abandoning the victims.
I am not offended. I was, perhaps strident, and I apologize. I don’t really think you would not feel the urge to provide for individual suffering, but I do think that we allow the Government to express our charity. I think that eliminated the major benefit of real charity, which is not about loss, and recovery, but about love, and connection.
Expecting unending government support for anything is a delusion. Emergency services, yes, there is no better instrument for that need than civil government. The long term rebuilding of lives? No, that takes community, and perhaps we all need to enlarge our concept of community.
But, yes, I think that every place that flooded should be condemned as uninhabitable, and the levees not rebuilt. Levees along the entire length of the Mississippi, and Missouri rivers as a group are the largest civil engineering structures in the history of the world, and they don’t work. Building on the flood plain is a bad idea. Insurance or government projects don’t change that, they just raise the price tag.
It would be cheaper to redraw the old neighborhoods on higher ground, and build there. That is a thing I could see subsidizing, since it has the remote possibility of creating a new community with close ties, and past history, and a view toward the future. Anything that takes place below sea level is an idiot’s pipe dream.
Tris
I am offended :mad:
Yeah, and the “own money” of non-homeowners and non-parents, who don’t get those deductions, is making up the revenue shortfall. People who get tax breaks that other people with comparable tax burdens aren’t entitled to, just because they chose to saddle themselves with expensive commitments like houses and children, are effectively getting government handouts off of other people’s tax money.
Now personally, I don’t actually mind the government doing a little social engineering by subsidizing particular lifestyles with tax breaks, but I don’t see much difference between that and subsidizing the survival of hurricane refugees with rent assistance.
The attempted distinction between receiving tax subsidies and receiving other forms of government subsidy (“your own money” versus “not your own money”) seems to me like mostly an artificial rationalization, so that people can accuse others of being lazy parasites without feeling guilty about the subsidies they get themselves. By that logic, if you had enough tax shelters and deductions to make your effective tax rate zero, you’d merely be keeping “your own money”. But other taxpayers would still be supporting you by paying for the government services you use, just as other taxpayers are paying for the FEMA housing assistance for Katrina refugees.
If you are taking housing deductions without needing them, shouldn’t you have the pride to say, no, give it to someone who needs the help more than I? The more and bigger deductions you take, the more other taxpayers have to carry the burden of the taxes you’re not paying.
What about training/schooling?
If the majority of the refugees are unskilled, well, “skill” em.
There must be some sort of programs out there to help train these folks. It should would be a hell of a lot cheaper to train someone for a year or two rather than paying for a lifetime of welfare.
I wouldn’t care if they continued to draw welfare benefits while being trained. Simply make it clear that:
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You will attend (and make suitable progress) in whatever area it is, and,
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You get X amount of time after you graduate, then the welfare stops. Period.
That’s a hell of a lot better deal than many kids coming out of high school get.
You get the same problems with training as you do with jobs. The number of classes available may be limited, and people will need transportation, daycare, etc. in order to be able to attend.
I have no problem with that. As Lissa notes, there are still issues of finance and logistics to address (that should not become the sole responsibility of Houston or Texas), but I have no problem with the idea that we invest effort to help people become independent. My only objection has been to those posts that seem to indicate that they are just lazy bums (all 700,000 families of them) who should have been able to find new jobs and new housing when they, lacking funds and (for the most part) skills, have been dumped into limited geographic areas with finite resources.
Are you offended that the government spent billions on a system that exposes the poor to mortal danger, and then proposes to rebuild it to the previous standard so they can be exposed again, or are you offended that that I noticed that that was idiotic?
Tris
He’s offended because he lives in a country called the Netherlands. It’s called that for a reason.
Nobody seems to have mentioned what would happen if FEMA support were cut off.
I would expect an epic crime wave.
Personally I would go for a massive government initiative to create jobs and retrain people.
It is very easy to pontificate about ‘initiative’ from a position of relative comfort, but once one has experienced a rather nasty shock to the system, one tends be rather cautious.
Then we will continue to pay their rent in the county jail. Texas has some ugly license plates, perhaps they can make some new ones.
Well I’m Canadian, but I was born in the Netherlands and I also worked for a Dutch company building a prototype dam in the Wash on the east coast of England. As a Dutchman, I’m very proud of my ethnic heritage and the ingenuity of my former country in dealing with the problems of living below sea level.
The sea can be beaten.
The event of Katrina in New Orleans is remarkably similar to what happened to the Netherlands in 1953.
The cost of rebuilding was born by a citizenry whose population was less than 5% of the size of the United States today. The Netherlands today is a very prosperous country.
The Netherlands is no pipe dream.
The Dutch disaster of 1953 is not a valid comparison. in the first place, the Dutch had NO CHOICE-they had to rebuild the dikes. Second, Holland is not faced with continuing threats of hurricanes. Third, (please correct me if I’m wrong) Holland is not faced with a subsistence rate of 10 feet/century 9which is the rate that NOLA is sinking).
So yes, through excellent engineering and tremendous financial expenditure, the Dutch triumphed over the North Sea. I can’t see spending the same amount on NOLA though-it would be s futile effort.
Yea, I was gonna ask Tris who gets to tell the Dutch they are living in an idiot’s pipe dream.
As for the refugees in Houston, I think they should be spread around the country to lessen the strain on any one region’s resources. We’re talking about 107K families, that’s what, probably about 500K people? Send 5000 families to each of the 20 largest metropolitan areas of the US and we’ll have a bunch of much easier to manage smaller scale situations. The Govt. can pay for the moving expenses, and for living quarters and living expenses for a FINITE amount of time after the move. That should give pretty much everybody who is willing to get back on their feet the opportunity to do so. Anyone else…well, they’ll fall through the cracks, as some people always do, onto the local social safety net, but if the refugees are spread across the country, no one municipality will be overwhelmed. Someone said “What if they don’t want to move?” My response would be “Tough”. If they want to continue to get help with living arrangements and money, then they will move. If they chose not to move, then they are on their own.
This is a model that worked in Thailand, and could work again with a bit of tweaking.
Take expert advice on what can be rebuilt and what can’t. Go to Houston and tell the refugees they’re going to rebuild their own community, and they will get paid to do it (otherwise their FEMA payments will be cut off). Recruit charity volunteers too.
Put together teams. Take it street by street. In the street, take a house at a time. Rebuild the house; clean; repaint; pay the workers for working on the house. Unskilled labor on the job learns a trade as they work. Set up a field toolshed with inventory; pay the toolshed workers. Set up a field kitchen - buy food from local businesses that are back up running - to feed the workers; pay the kitchen staff for working too, until the economy is moving enough for the kitchen to self-sustain. Set up a store for the workers to spend their money; the store owner benefits from the trade. When that house is finished, move somebody into it; start on the next until the street is finished. Set up support offices; pay the staff of the offices for working there. This is happening simultaneously all over the worst areas, bit by bit by bit.
Of course, this needs a lot of money to work. Doesn’t matter where the money is coming from, government or charity, but it’s helping people to help themselves rather than causing resentment in their host communities.
Ah.
But there is one great big difference between their levee system, and ours.
Their’s works.
Ok, the anything below sea level bit was over the . . . er. . . under. . uh,
Well, OK, sorry.
Tris
Never mind Tris, it’s all water under the bridge at this point. 
Yeah…cuz that would be cheaper…well…actualy it would cost many times as much assuming we had the jail space…which we dont. We’re pretty much full up with criminals at the moment. But at what, about 20 grand per poor person we lock up and all that money coming out of the pockets of Texas citizens instead of federal I’m pretty sure that would flat out bankrupt the state.
I don’t understand this thinking. We are giving them money and housing. If the government provides them with training, you are expecting Uncle Sugar to pony up for transportation, daycare and so on. Do we have to hold their hands as they cross the streets, too? How about wipe their butts?
Where the hell is personal responsibility? How about a little self-respect? I would not want to keep sucking off the government teat a minute longer than I have to. When I got laid off, sure I signed up for unemployment but I went out every day looking for work. Until the right job came along, I worked days at a grocery store and nights delivering pizzas. I refused to let my son see that it was OK to get things handed to you. You work hard, bust your ass and not only will you feel like you earned it but you will have a major sense of accomplishment and pride.
I feel bad for the evacuees. They lost everything they had and, in many cases, they didn’t have a lot to start with. They’ve been torn from their neighbors, friends and families and placed in unfamiliar locations where they are being considered parasites and pariahs. But there is no reason they cannot be held accountable to act like responsible adults and take care of themselves and their families. That old adage about, “Give a man a fish…” is true.
I will help someone in times of trouble. I will hold out my hand to help them up. But I will not carry them. If they are able-bodied and capable of working, then they need to get to work. If they want to move back to NOLA and help rebuild, more power to them. If they want to stay where they were relocated and make a new life there, fantastic. If they want to sit on their butts waiting for the next government check, cut them off.