Episode 19: So, we're going to rebuild New Orleans
President Bush announced that the federal government will pay "the great majority" of the cost of rebuilding. Estimates so far seem to be about $200 billion, and $62.3 billion of that has already been spent. The money already spent is 2.5% of the $2.5 trillion dollar budget--the biggest government budget in the history of the universe.
For fun, you can estimate your own contribution to rebuilding New Orleans: assuming no tax increases are passed to fund it, take your tax bill last April, and multiply by 0.025. That's how much you paid already. Now multiply it by 0.08, since $200 billion is 8% of the total budget today. That's how much they estimate you'll pay in total. Now double it. That's a better guess. If I'm grumpy, it's because I have other uses for the more than $1,000 I expect to contribute personally to rebuild the city that was the murder capital of the US in the mid 1990s, and still has ten times more homicide than the national average.
How about you? Does it make you feel good to pay so much to rebuild a city whose main export is debauchery? I'm sure you don't need me to tell you what goes on there during Mardi Gras, not to mention gay Mardi Gras. But, according to Bush, there's "no way to imagine America without New Orleans," so by all means let's pay enough money to buy Belgium so Bush can know that somewhere, someone is trading beads for lechery at Mardi Gras.
posted by Len Budney at 1:39 PM
1 Comments:
I can't say that a port on the Mississippi isn't needed--but I can say that it isn't worth enough money to buy Belgium! What the president proposes is about the most expensive way imaginable to get the job done. A shipping company could build a port there for a few million, not a few hundred billion!
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