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.
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?
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yet, the healthcare doesn't discriminate between consequential and circumstantial ailments. I wonder why not?
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.
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.
I don't fully subscribe to it myself, since I support some subsidies, but for many things it applies.
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).
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)
They should just pay people affected by this to move.