“In These Times” has an investigative piece on the Bush Administration’s history of disregarding the demands for levee funding from the Corps of Engineers and from Congress. A small investment in maintenance was repeatedly rejected in the face of high risk that a catastrophe would cost hundreds of billions. Hurricanes Rain on Bush’s Tax Cut Parade. How the Katrina catastrophe proves that conservatives’ tax cut zealotry has left america vulnerable to disaster — From In These Times.

As far as it goes, the piece is instructive about how “Political Expediency” sacrificed real needs and real people.

However, there is so much more to the story. I’m sure that prior administrations made some bad choices for the levees as well. Everyone who studied the levee issue at the time, over the years, knew that New Orleans was vulnerable and would cost many many billions to bailout, and far less to save.

Here are a few other things to consider:

• Should we bailout the gulf region and New Orleans, AND, Should we permit rebuilding in such a disaster-prone area if we provide bailout money? - House Speaker Dennis Hastert apparently floated the question of whether we should do the bailout at all. Fiscal Liberals are lashing his bottom for that statement. I personally am torn. The USA has a pattern of bailing out communities after catastrophies. However, who made the rule that we should permit rebuilding after bailout? If the USA is going to buy out so much of New Orleans and the surrounding lowlands, we should KEEP IT and deny anyone the right to rebuild! Turn the bought-out land into a National Park.

  Why should we do a bailout this year and let people rebuild just so we can subsidize the next disaster too? I hate the idea that hundreds of billions are going to be spent in 10 years to do all disater relief all over again. There is something different about the Mississippi - Louisiana gulf coast compared to Florida. The swamps flood larger populated areas, seemingly. The area is too vulnerable and should be bought out and set aside as a park, for our hundreds of billions.

  I’ll listen to opposing views. One idea is to do the buyout and then have Congress pass a law that no further Federal hurricane assistance will be provided in any way, no flood insurance, no FEMA, no nothing, rebuild and live there at your own risk. Otherwise, the Feds will buy your land and provide relocation assistance. [Damn, I sound pretty radical and hard-hearted on this — I may have to rethink!]

• Red Beggar States in the name of low taxes - Last night on Joe Scarborough, a Republican Senator from Mississippi talked about the storm devastation and the need for Federal bailout. I was stunned when he referred to his state as follows: We are a “LOW-TAX LOW-SERVICE STATE”. It hit me that this Republican was admitting that his “low tax” state was By “Conservative” Design a poor state, designed to have minimal governmental resources and expectant of receiving handouts. That’s not self-reliant conservatism. Self-reliant conservatism would call for Mississippi to refuse Federal bailout, because Mississipians take care of themselves. By underfunding their own government, Mississippi exists in the expectation of handouts from the “Higher Tax” states - the Blue States.

  We need a political awakening in the USA - We need to have a national debate about the shell game played so-called conservatives in the “Red States”, who rail against taxes and de-fund their own states, knowing full-well that the “Blue States” and the Federal Governement will be their sugar daddies in times of need. Times of need always come sooner or later.

  This shifting of financial responsibility from the Red States to the Blue States is worthy of intense debate. Here in Missouri, we have something similar going on under the control of so-called conservatives, with a seemingly head in the sand reckless refusal to ask the public to cough up bucks for needed things, so we cut funding for the needed things and shift the day of reckoning to later on. At some point, a day of reckoning will occur and the cost of dealing with those things will go up tenfold.

• We know that the underfunded levees ended up costing 10 times as much in bailout as it would have cost to prevent the problem. What other infrastructure time bombs are there? - Before you say that the government has no business being in the infrastructure business, let me point to the Interstate Highway System. If you think the highway system is a bad thing for the Feds to have funded, then your worldview is so radical and so far outside the mainstream of society that we have nothing to discuss.

  Now, Who shall pay to maintain the highways? Bridges need expensive repair, or they will fall down. Or the bridges will be closed when they become too dangerous, disrupting our robust economy in some areas. New bridges are needed to better enable economic activity. These are real tangible investments in our future that pay dividends to keep our economy strong.

  BUT —- If we underfund bridge repair, a bridge collapses or gets so bad it must be shut down and replaced. A few people get killed in the bridge collapse, and for a year or two traffic gets re-routed while a new bridge gets built. For $50 million we could have prevented the following: a $1 billion new bridge, a few possible lost lives, and maybe a couple of billion in lost economic activity or increased economic costs due to business being re-routed.

  Shared investments in hard infrastructure, if logically chosen of course, pay huge dividends. They improve economic activity and quality of life.

  We know that the day of reckoning will cost many times the maintenance costs, yet we deny funding of the maintenance costs for the pre-existing hard infrstructure. Makes no logical sense, although it makes short term perverse political sense

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  And I wonder how many other levees and dams around the country are in dire need of maintenance or replacement …….. ?