I got a great idea…

I’ve got a great idea, well, perhaps it really isn’t once you think it through, but we’ll go ahead with this thought anyway. Let’s you and me find us some swampland, you know the cheap kind that is very likely to flood with any heavy rain or adverse weather. Then we’ll go to good old Uncle Sam and apply for loans to build condos, houses and apartments all over the place. Then, if they flood and get ruined, we go do it again.

Now, we’re going to do this in spite of the fact that we know in our heart of hearts that at some point in time this whole entire area will most likely flood and cause great damage to the projects which have been constructed. Which will mean more money to restore the properties and start over.

Do you think we have a chance of getting our money to fund this project’

I think any sane person would say no, no way Jose. Not going to happen. Not in our lifetime.

So, what are we going to do about rebuilding New Orleans’

Isn’t this what we’re hearing from the government and the news media’Rebuild, just as before’Good as new. You tell me, does this make any sense’I don’t think so.

What we, the tax payers are supposed to do is grin and bear the horrendous cost of rebuilding an entire city or at least the majority of an entire city that is below sea level and is prone to flooding at any given time. We have all seen how fragile the levees in New Orleans are, courtesy of Misses Katrina and Rita. So we are to believe and support the proposal to go back into a potentially flood prone piece of countryside and spend some 100 or so billions of dollars to rebuild because’well, just because.

I’m sorry, I certainly feel sorry for the folks over there who lost their houses, businesses and their lives, but I hardly think this is the justification for starting over and have it happen again in the future. What happens four or five years from now, if we rebuild and another direct hit comes and does the same thing as these past two hurricanes. You can’t adopt the attitude that a hurricane won’t happen; the attitude must be one of when will it happen’Hurricanes do occur and with some frequency. Kind of like riding a motorcycle, it isn’t if you are going to fall off, it’s a matter of when you will do so.

Let’s look at it another way. Several of our states have areas that we would deem dangerous to build any type of settlement on. Think Hawaii on the side of an active volcano or California directly over the San Andreas Fault. If someone wants to build on one of those hazardous areas with their own money, more power to them. But, if they want to build using your money and mine as taxpayers, then should they be allowed to do so’

I got a chuckle (very sadly) out of a comment made the other day by a legislator from Louisiana. He made the statement that ‘The money to rebuild Louisiana is going to come from FEMA, not the taxpayers.’

Excuse me, but I didn’t realize that FEMA was a for-profit operation. Perhaps I just missed something, but I thought the United States taxpayers funded it. I suppose I have just been misinformed and FEMA is really a for profit organization like Starbucks or General Motors. Maybe they own Starbucks or General Motors’who knows’

Anyway, my point is, I think it is a total waste of our hard earned money that we as taxpayers have to pay into the system to create something that has such a potential for disaster in the future.

But, then that’s just my opinion’. for what it’s worth.