Posted by
flagwaver on Monday, November 23, 2009 12:17:02 PM
Back in the mid to late 1980s a young Tom Hanks and a skyrocketing Shelley Long co-starred in a movie called The Money Pit. It was all about a young couple that bought this beautiful old house as sort of a "fixer-upper" dream home that seemed to just need a few repairs to make it perfect. The couple starts the remodeling but it gets more and more expensive, as the solving of one problem leads to the discovery of another; before they know the young couple is up to their eyeballs in red ink, and it starts to fray their marriage. Not the greatest movie of all time, but a good one...well worth watching on a lazy afternoon.
Well, we as a nation have our very own Money Pit, and it is called the Gulf Coast, and specifically New Orleans. It seems that no matter how much money we the taxpayers get ripped for in "Hurricane Katrina Relief Funds", or how much private companies and individuals give, there is always a supposed need for more cash. The place is a black hole for relief funding!
Think about this: in Fiscal Year 2005 the Congress allocated $62.3 billion for
Katrina Relief, in 2006
$577 million was raised by over 400 corporations and foundations, and there was $25.5 billion allocated in the
stimulus package for the Gulf Coast region. And that doesn't count the $300 million bribe paid to Mary Landrieu for her vote on the health care scam. According to Sen. Landrieu, she's proud of getting the money to
"defer the effects of budget shortfalls." But even excluding her big pile of payola cash, we're still looking at around $88.4 billion dollars flushed down the Katrina Latrina1
And what do we have to show for it? A city that is still not close to rebuilt after all these years, a city that is still rife with corruption, and a demand for ever more taxpayer money to bail out the region. We are getting hosed on this "investment" and it's high time we stopped trowing cash down the rat hole there; if NOLA can't figure out how to rebuilt and reboot, while the "rednecks" over in Mississippi can, they need to be cut off from the public dole.
It's time that NOLA either learns to sink...which they already did once...or swim. Either way, the 4 year guilt trip needs to end.