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I would rather we spent tax dollars on fixable problems with much more social good per dollar. I'm tired of subsidizing flood insurance for idiots that keep building in areas that flood every 10 years. Subsidizing someone to have a nice home on a Miami beech is not "actual good". L

Take a hard look at the subsidies you are benefiting from. Be ready to give them up if you’re going to take the holier than thou route.

Tu quoque much?

Maybe the whole country would be better if everyone was willing to give up these sorts of unsustainable subsidies?

We (society as a whole) have an economic mechanism for protecting against risk - insurance. In places where insurance is too expensive or not available at all, perhaps we should consider letting nature take over.

One persons's 'unsustainable subsidy' is another person's 'showing compassion for those who are less fortunate'. It's not like New Orleans is a particularly affluent area either, and people have lived there for a very long time.

Take health insurance—one view could be that it forces people who are healthier to subsidize those who are less healthy.

While some people are unhealthy due to factors outside of control, others are unhealthy because they do unhealthy things. Would you consider the latter an 'unsustainable subsidy'?

Wait what? You're comparing healthcare, which is a necessity, to choosing to live in a particular city. People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though.

I agree with you that NOLA isn't just the wealthy. But, that doesn't change the fact that its not a sustainable city to live in.

Don't a large number of people have health problems as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise? I think that would qualify as a choice. I know I could probably lower my cholesterol with more discipline. If I choose not to, it's reasonable for me to pay higher insurance premiums.

I'm reacting to the harsh, judgmental attitude towards people in NOLA and using health care insurance to point out that the world is complicated.

Some people are certainly unhealthy because of choices they made (yet there's still broad support for universal risk sharing), while some people in NOLA certainly aren't there by choice.

The poverty rate there is about twice the US average, and something like 40% of Americans don't have any substantial savings. Many people aren't able to uproot themselves and move even if they wanted to without outside financial assistance, at which point I'm sure someone will be asking 'why should we pay to move people when they made a bad choice of where to live?', forgetting that these people may have lived there for generations.

You can be poor anywhere in the US, it doesn't have to be in a flood zone.

The main argument for rebuilding these areas seems to be "these people have lived there for generations". People move, and catastrophic flooding seems like a better reason than most.

> People that need healthcare don't have a choice, people _do_ have a choice to relocate to a more sustainable city though[...]

People have a choice in relocating from New Orleans for less flood risk, but they don't have a choice to relocate from the US if their main problem with living there is is with the US's health care system?

I'm not going to argue that they should, but this example isn't exactly doing the work for you that you seem to think it's doing. If you're going to say "just move from New Orleans" someone else can say "just move to Canada".

You can argue about the relative difficulty of those things, but they're not inherently different, and there's certainly people for whom it's a lot easier to move countries than say people in abject poverty in New Orleans who can't imagine pulling off a move to another city in the US.

Have you ever actually tried moving to a different country? Its exponentially harder than moving a few miles down the road.

Plus this argument is losing the point that the government is already spending the money trying to temporarily fix the problem instead of using that money to buy up the properties at a price point that would allow the residents to move.

I know not everyone would want to move, so I'm personally a fan of mandatory flood insurance in those flood prone areas. When there inevitably is a flood the resident can rebuild from their own pocket or use the insurance to move.

Yeah, four times now. As noted I'm not saying it's easier than moving down the street, just that if we're talking about people in such poverty that they couldn't move down the street comparing it to the experience of other more well-off people moving countries is hardly unreasonable.

No, he's comparing an unhealthy lifestyle to choosing to live in a particular city. People _do_ have a choice to change their lifestyle.

Yet, the healthcare doesn't discriminate between consequential and circumstantial ailments. I wonder why not?

It should. I believe you should pay more if you have unhealthy life style. First implement a good universal health care, second make people making the wrong choices (smoking is a wrong choice, being old is not) pay more.

It's tricky. For instance: My understanding is that people who smoke tend to die younger, and therefore spend less for healthcare over their lifetime than people who don't. So why should they pay more?

Then there is the whole question of "what is an unhealthy lifestyle?" It seems likely that not getting enough exercise is probably unhealthy, but diet advice is all over the place. You need better science than we have now to make these decisions.

There is substantial research that says that conditional care like what you propose is often used as a cudgel to deny Government assistance to those that need it the most.

In other words, I think the cost of putting in these guardrails, often with good intentions, is that they're misused against minorities and the poor. If that's the case, I would rather a few freeloaders/bad decision makers abuse it rather than the most needy going without the healthcare they desperately want.

If people choose to go rock climbing or ride motorcycles should they also pay more for health care?

Sometimes in history whole cities get moved a few miles. It's expensive, yes, but it does it done. In the 1950s and 60s Ontario and Quebec in Canada moved some smaller villages away from the St. Lawrence river when it was being expanded. Some cities get moved because damns are being built like in China's Three Gorges Dam.

Yes.

I live in revelstoke, if we do that Canada cant ship goods from coast to coast from december to april (the subsidy I have in mind is the Rogers pass avalanche control program) Those subsidies exist because they benefit people.

The usual counterargument to this is that the people who benefit should pay for it themselves. Only if the true price is available to consumers can they make informed choices.

I don't fully subscribe to it myself, since I support some subsidies, but for many things it applies.

You're assuming they're shipping luxury, optional goods, but what if they're essentials like food and medicine?

I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works (case in point: SF, where people rather live in substandard housing or the street and have a shot at a big tech or startup company than move somewhere affordable).

> I mean yes you can make the argument that if it's too expensive you shouldn't be living there, but that's not how it works

It sounds like you're saying "we oughtn't change the status quo because it wouldn't be the status quo". What am I misunderstanding? (Apologies if this is obvious; still waking up)

This seems like a good idea, until you get to interconnected systems that everyone depends on (like eg. the levees around an island, or a large harbor). Then it's STILL a good idea; in those cases everyone should pay!

You might not want to give the new Alberta government any ideas.

Where do I sign up? If ever there's been a holier than thou route it's thinking your ideas are so good that buying them should be mandatory.

I'd suggest a more rational subsidy. Tornadoes, earthquakes, lightning, fire, those can be managed for but are largely unpredictable. Water is predictable, it follows gravity. We have maps already that tell us where it will go in a flood. I'd like the program to be, the government will pay you the value of the property before the flood. Then it becomes government property, basically parkland, and no one can build on it ever again. You are going to have to rebuild somewhere else. Eventually all the places that can flood will flood and then there will be no more subsidy necessary.

It’s not really a subsidy, just poor use of tax dollars. I like my taxes being used for wise infrastructure projects. As a whole, the benefit the whole. Individually they benefit some individuals more than others. But I don’t consider that a subsidy.

What you're missing is the Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here.

Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.

Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.

14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.

For anyone else who might be confused like I was, "Nola" seems to be a nickname for New Orleans, derived from "New Orleans, Louisiana" -> "New Orleans, LA" -> "NOLA" -> "Nola".

What if we just keep the port and relocate the rest of the city? It's not that you need hundreds of thousands people to run port facility. Damn, if you even need 500.

There's also one of, if not the, largest petrochemical manufacturing corridors as well. Tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of GDP.

How about you guys just pay the money so you can keep your gas prices low, GDP up, and imported goods flowing to your house?

That's sounds like something that can be easily relocated to Texas.

To noted non-flooding at all cities Houston and Galveston?

Yeah but it's not there? Why not relocate Wall Street to Cleveland? Or Silicon Valley to Pittsburg?

'easily'

Why not just relocate silicon valley to Pittsburgh where rents are cheaper?

Problem solved!

So much plain and simple arrogance and ignorance in this thread. Mind blowing.

14 bil year is a bargain for what this city provides.

The planet is in constant change except on longer timescales than humans can perceive. Just because a geographic location is great for a city at one time doesn't mean it will stay that way forever.

They should just pay people affected by this to move.

incentivize people not to be idiots and move to areas less susceptible to environmental catastrophe

Speaking specifically about New Orleans, it will _never_ be a good place for a city. It's a coastal city with large areas below sea level. The foreseeable future (for decades to centuries) is that sea levels will rise and Gulf hurricanes will increase in severity.

We spend more tax dollars on the military than anything else; that’s also a sort of never-ending wall building exercise intended to prevent floods of war & immigration... maybe we’re all idiots. ;)

* > Proceeding to read the article, over a decade the Army Corps of Engineers raised hundreds of miles of levees. If this were a thread about how the US can't complete big projects any more, that alone would be a ray of sunshine.

Unfortunately even that sunshine requires applying sunscreen as it reminds of their calculations that don’t favor helping the most people.

Still, even if the [Army Corp of Engineers] approach is designed to avoid picking winners and losers, it ends up doing so anyway, favoring wealthier neighborhoods. "It's also going to be [choosing] more valuable businesses," Kling says. "More valuable real estate."

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/688786177/how-federal-disaste...

I agree with you re the cynicism.

I would say in these cases though that he levees are the problem. You have silted up channels because the river needs to flood, and the excessive levee system makes that problem more pronounced and contributes to the shrinking of the delta.

That said, New Orleans shouldn’t die. But we’re making the problem worse for most stakeholders in other places.

No kind deed goes unpunished, and it's starting to really leave a bitter taste in some people's mouths. The cynicism is real and deserved.

Well I came to comment no this:

>> “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,”

Not that I like either option, but I'd rather my tax dollars be spent on relocating these people than fighting an eternal war against the inevitable march of nature. Can I do anything personally about it? Not really. Certainly far less than any individual who lives there. But if my taxes are going to be used to help, then please help in a way that is more effective than doing the same stupid thing (building below sea level) that they've been doing for a hundred years.

Nola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and rest of the country come through here.

Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina.

14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.

They're not keeping it around to be nice.

>Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.

Unfortunately, the current zeitgeist is one in which if you say the wrong thing, are misinterpreted, "mansplain" or simply disagree with the wrong people you're going to get railroaded, brigaded, reported to authorities, fired or blacklisted.

In a world like that, where everyone is an opponent, who wants to "help their neighbour"?

Wait America deserves a pat on the back for providing basic infrastructure? What standards do we hold the US to, Bangladesh or the Netherlands?

Feigned moral indignation over 'cynicism' won't change the fact that real money was really wasted.

> Instead of worrying about the state of the world, spend an hour of your social media/fuck around time a day/week/month doing something for someone else. It'll do some actual good.

Also, speak for yourself. You don't know what people spend their time doing outside of writing comments on HN.

I do that, and I agree: I wish people would spend as much time complaining about other people as they do helping them. Yet, 40% of my paycheck is still taken against my will anyway.