Liberal Talk Radio

I can’t comment much more than has already been said on Hurricane Katrina. The damage looks awful, and I would love to go down there and help out, but it seems like more people in the way isn’t what they need. So I sent money, via the Red Cross. I think that’s best. I encourage everyone to do the same.

Back when I was a Boy Scout I used to do disaster drills for the Red Cross. We’d go out to Mitchell Field and clean up after mock disasters. It was good work. Reminds you of why it’s important to drill these things over and over. Because you never know what you’re going to encounter.

Could we have prepared more for this? Absolutely. As has been widely reported, we had to slash the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget last year, in part to pay for another round of tax cuts. This meant stalling work on the Levees around New Orleans. Put aside the tragic human cost of this diaster for a moment. Even if you believe that those tax cuts “stimulated the economy,” you have to wonder, purely in economic terms, if the “recovery” was worth it. When you strip the government bare to finance a tax giveaway, you leave yourself with fewer options, less of a safety net, and greater overall risk. It’s a choice.

Would the levees have made a difference? We’ll never know. But it certainly would have been nice to honestly say we did everything we could.