What was the rationale in House Repubs blowing off the Sandy aid vote? NJ & NY Repubs are pissed!

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@BigT

Sandy was in no way predictable, and acting like it was is ridiculous. This a completely different weather system that we are seeing. There hasn’t been something like this in that area in a long, long time, definitely in my remembered lifetime.

It was not at all predictable. That’s not the point - or at least my point. Sandy was a very bad break for a lot of people. I don’t think it’s the responsibility to the federal government to reimburse people for life’s bad breaks.

Most other people don’t either. If some guy’s basement floods, no one thinks the Feds should pay him back just because it was unfortunate and unpredictable. But when you get highly publicized tragedies, the attitude changes, for a lot of people.

Of course the government pays when its infrastructure is damaged.

That’s true. But you would expect the local governments to pay for local infrastructure damage and state governments for state infrastructure and so on.

The government does disaster relief. It’s part of the job description.

This is not disaster relief. Disaster relief is when people are in precarious and dangerous situations now. That situation has passed. This is about reimbursing everyone for their losses.

[Dewey_Finn]

If it’s not disaster relief, it’s disaster recovery, and prevention of damage from future events.

[Mdcastle]

Since people in non-flood prone areas are subsidizing people in flood prone areas anyway, what about just requiring that all homeowners insurance cover floods and do away with government subsidized specialty insurance and bailouts?

[control-z]

@Hal_Briston

The pubbie-lovers on my facebook feed are screaming one word about the bill: “Pork!!”

Of course, they can’t identify any actual pork in the bill (they’ve tried, but everything they’ve named had a perfectly rational reason to be there). And absolutely none of them live within 20 miles of any affected areas.

Congress approves scaled-back Sandy aid bill | CNN Politics

The original storm legislation also included what some Republicans saw as congressional “pork,” or money for unrelated pet projects. Budget hawks viewed the extra funding as wasteful in an era of record deficits.

Some lawmakers and taxpayer interest groups teased out $8 million for cars for the Homeland Security and Justice departments, $2 million for the Smithsonian to repair roofs, $150 million for fisheries, and $100 million for repair of Head Start facilities.

“It’s perceived to be free money. It goes around the budget caps that are ever tightening. Traditionally we haven’t offset disaster funding, but that doesn’t mean that some of these things should be in there,” said Steve Ellis, vice president for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog. “It’s honey for the flies.”