To be honest, the biggest thing that stuck with me during the debate was the point that people, including myself, brought up "Why not Katrina?". And I think it comes back to this irony of trying to find the value of a person's life and in America we deem those wealthy stockbroker's in NYC to be worth more than those in the slums of New Orleans. The 9/11 fund was to protect the big business that we find to be so important in the US and it was because as a whole they were more "valuable" than those individuals who were lost. Which kind of shows to me how ridiculous it is to try to figure out based on potential how much someone is "worth". And so in the case of these funds, I think that everyone should just be given an equal amount, and should be grateful they get something at all. It doesn't matter if the rich won't be satisfied with a smaller amount, they're not really needing the help in the first place.
So as a politician, I would probably rarely support these types of funds, especially considering the motivation behind them. The only example would be in the case of governmental eff-ups, like Katrina. I think they more than anyone deserve a fund, that was the government failing them and our system failing them, not terrorists and not random disasters. It would be the only responsible thing to do. The only exception would be, I would support establishing funds in the case of things like the 35W bridge and 9/11 to cover the health costs of survivors because their insurance won't cover it, because it's a tangible cost to cover and we can see the benefits of not leaving people with millions of dollars in medical bills. Which I think is totally ridiculous but that's another issue.
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This is the type of situation that I would absolutely not fund, or would be last in the list of funds to approve. Katrina was a natural disaster. Louisiana is in the hurricane belt. The government should not be obligated to fund those people who insist on staying in an obviously dangerous place. I believe the argument came up in class that the levees were not good enough, and that the government knew this. The same idea applies to this sort of situation: If you know there is a likely chance that a natural disaster can destroy your home, your family, and your life; there is no reason to maintain living there.
ReplyDeleteBridgit, would you really consider using scarce taxpayer's dollars in times like these? The Japanese internment camps case I find interesting since the fund was approved by Congress and signed by Ronald Reagan during an economic recession. Should the state of our governments financial picture be a factor when considering VCF's?
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry Axl, but I think "if natural disasters happen, don't live there" argument is really really ridiculous. Natural disasters happen everywhere, so unless you want people to live on the moon, it's something that needs to be dealt with.
ReplyDeleteYes, Katrina was a natural disaster, but the damage could have been a million times less if the government had listened to people when they said the levees were inefficient and it is the government's job to maintain them. This isn't a "no one could have predicted it case" but a "the government just didn't care" case. And after that, they messed up the relief operations too. It would be like sitting there for 3 days after 9/11 and wondering which level of government is gonna start pulling those people out of the rubble. The government is there to protect the people and when they fail spectacularly, the people they fail deserve some help getting their lives together on their own, since the government is incapable of doing so.