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New Orleans, a decrepit, decaying, dirty old city barely existing tens of feet below the level of the Mississippi river, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico, blasted by a fierce hurricane and flooded with beau coup polluted water. Add to the national debt by spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build it back? Why? So the same thing can happen again? I read years ago in a basic geology text book that in 100 years every location on the gulf coast has a 100 percent probablility of enduring a devastating hurricane, one that totally reconfigures the coastline. I'm not sure Katrina reached that level. Possibly, but probably not. Today, in the era of global warming, the hurricanes are becoming fiercer, the levels of the seas higher, and the interval between devastations shorter. In fact, the risk for an even worse storm hitting New Orleans before the end of this year is high. See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5742/1807 I, for one, think it's a terrible waste of money to rebuild New Orleans. It would make more sense to abandon the site and spend our money building on higher ground away from the coast, perhaps as far north as Memphis. Use government money (and mortgage more of our grandchildren's future) to rebuild the million dollar resort homes and timeshares along the sea coast? Hell no. |
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It does seem a rather silly way to spend money. But either way, they have to drain it so they can clean it up, and once it's drained, people will want to build. I think that's just people's gut reaction to a defeat of any sort - "we will overcome". Yeah, I'm confidant there will be a New Orleans. Certainly, there needs to be a port city at the mouth of the Mississippi. I just hope we don't end up spending a crazy lot of money to put it back "exactly like it was". I hope people think about things, and take into account that the flooding isn't all that anomalous an event. On September 20th, 2005 06:30 pm (UTC), (Anonymous) replied: Remember it's not 'our' money we're talking about; it's the money of future generations. I have no problems with the locals spending their money, or money they've been given through charities, to rebuild; in fact, I think that would be nice and probably something I'd want to do, if I were them. And if we agreed to raise taxes to do it, I would be grudgingly in favor of that. I'm just against the government borrowing the money to rebuild something that is likely to be destroyed again in the near future. Our government has already done too much of that. I'm also not interested in Bush's idea of trimming that much out of the existing expenditures. When he talks of that, I don't think he's talking about the money we're blowing in Iraq. On September 20th, 2005 06:37 pm (UTC), (Anonymous) replied: Yeah, I'm expecting to hear that we need to lower taxes to rebuild the Gulf any day now. We've been eating our infrastructure at an alarming rate, rather than maintaining it, under the Bush administration. Which is part of why the levees broke to begin with. |
