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If this hadn't happened, would FEMA have an extra $300 million to use on other things, or would they simply be appropriated $300 million less?
Same question for the illegal migrants program that everyone on Twitter seems to be talking about.
That's... even worse.
If money can be allocated whenever, it sends a clear signal that FEMA values illegal aliens and synogogues more than they value helping Americans in an actual disaster.
This is incredibly black pilling.
I think you reversed the order of money allocation...?
If the money is appropriated for a purpose, that means it can't be allocated whenever- it can only be spent for the purpose the legislature appropriated it for from the start, and thus does not come with the opportunity cost of a later allocation decision. The money would not have been there for FEMA for the first place if it wasn't for the purpose it was appropriated.
This is the difference between being given $20 to do what you want and spending it irresponsibly, and only getting $20 to use towards a thing you may / may not care about. Not using the $20 for the thing you do not care about does not convert it into $20 you can use how you want.
You can argue the wisdom of an annual budget for spending on things you don't care about, but the initial appropriate can't send signals that care more about a previously planned thing over a later shortage because the initial appropriation for a fiscal year is on the assumption that it would meet forecasted needs.
Which is why the normal thing for a national government is to later appropriate more money on a more ad hoc basis later in the fiscal year.
Jeroboam is referring to the ability of the Jews to manufacture a national panic in order to swindle $300 million from FEMA while North Carolinians are left with peanuts. The order of money allocation does not alleviate the sheer injustice of the dynamic that is at play.
$300m is peanuts. It costs tens of billions to recover from major hurricanes. This is as financially illiterate as when people think that taxing billionaires a bit more would ‘fix the deficit’ or whatever.
FEMA’s annual budget is like $20bn.
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Jeroboam and you both seems unfamiliar with governmental budgetary practices. The order of money allocation does alleviate a falsely accused injustice because the order of money allocation renders the charge baseless.
FEMA cannot be swindled out of $300 million if FEMA never had $300 million that could be allocated for other purposes. If the money is only appropriated to FEMA for the purpose of migrant support, it'd be more accurate to say FEMA received $300 million more than it otherwise would have with the potential for ancillary benefits of dual-utilization investments that would be absent Congress had chosen another agency to help disperse the appropriated funds. Since American budgets work more along the lines of Purpose -> Funds -> Agency rather than Agency -> Funds -> Purpose, it is wrong to claim spending on one cause stole from another, even by the same agency, unless those are specifically the same funding line.
Since gaining $300 million you otherwise wouldn't have but for the action has considerably different moral and ethical implications than losing $300 million you could have used but for the action, this would if anything be the opposite of a swindle.
This is the distinction between an appropriation and an allocation.
While I don't agree with SS's strident anti-Jewish take, he is directionally correct.
Hiding being bureaucratic procedures is the last refuge of the scoundrel. If this was viewed as actually important by the administration, the money would be found.
Judge a system by what it does.
I'll accept your concession that the administration views this as actually important.
The claim that FEMA is out of money derives from the remarks of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had in a press conference on Wednesday, 2 October. Specifically-
Money is being found. Money was always being found. There was never a point where the money was not being found. Ergo, the issue was, is and always has been viewed as Actually Important by the Administraiton.
So where is the money shortage narrative deriving from?
This is not a claim that FEMA does not have money. This is a claim that FEMA does not have sufficient funding on-hand for the hurricane season, with another hurricane in sight, when you factor in the recovery efforts of the one that just hit.
Which is completely normal, as FEMA isn't funded on the front-end to cover the full cost of future disasters. The normal model for FEMA funding by Congress is enough money to handle immediate response- the point that Mayorkas is explicitly saying they have funding for- and to then re-top it off before adding in what is needed for tail-end costs.
Can Congress add in more if there's a need?
This funding for response deriving from-
So to recap-
-The head of the head of FEMA says there is money for the immediate crisis
-The Democratic administration is saying there is money on hand for the immediate response
-The Republican House Speaker agrees there is no issue on response funding for the immediate response
-Congress appropriated $20 billion as FEMA needs but to last the entire year as part of a short-term spending bill
And in future prospects
-The head of the head of FEMA says there is another hurricane on the way and they may need more money by the end of the hurricane season
-The Democratic administration is signaling that they may ask for additional FEMA funding later this fall
-The Republican House Speaker is non-committal on stopping election campaign fundraising to support an earlier refill
-Congress critters of both parties are considering coming back in October to pass more funding
And in this context, the $300 million grant, allocated in an entirely different funding context and thus not in contest with the $20 billion fund top up last month, is raised as directionally correct of there being a lack of funds to provide immediate help.
Now, while I am sure that some people find 300,000,000 a really impressive number, and all the more if written out, this itself is against a 20,000,000,000 pot of money that is the pre-Hurricane amount for a roughly 3-month period. Do some basic division structure, and you reach a staggering..
300,000,000/20,000,000,000 = 3/200 = 0.015 = 1.5%
1.5% of the short-term budget, allocated an entire fiscal year before, is truly all the difference in the handling of the current crisis.
Meanwhile, if we bother to look at FEMA's Monthly Disaster Relief Fund report which it provides to Congress monthly... let's take July 24 since that's before the current funding questions and would have helped feed the Congressional top-off decision...
Annex B identifies FY costs by event, by month, and with a cumulative by the year. On page 9 of document (12 of PDF), you will see that Hurricane Sandy- all the way back in 2012- has a current FY24 obligation of... 334 million dollars.
To reiterate- the entire number raised as Jewish swindling creating a current response shortage is insufficient to cover the ongoing DRF obligations of a single hurricane from a decade ago.
And sure, Hurricane Sandy is larger than some of these old ones... but it's nowhere near the top of the list either.
Hurricane Maria, from 2017, has a fullyear-obligation of 11,450... million. Which is to say, 11.45 billion.
COVID-19 is charging the DRF 20.45 billion in FY24. A single line item for a year is more than the entire budget for a quarter of a year.
Of course, those are full-year totals, and we're talking a 3-month coverage of 20 billion.
If we take the 3-month totals of July and then the estimated August/September obligations as a frame of reference, we'd see that for JUL-SEP FY24, FEMA thought it would need... a bit over 15 billion for 3 months.
And Congress allocated 20 billion for 3 months, before a historic hurricane hit a region ill-prepared for it.
So to bring this around-
In September 2024, Congress passed a $20 billion disaster relief fund budget for 3 months.
It did so with a reasonable expectation that about $15 billion would have been needed for all already existing expenses.
This would leave about 5 billion for all new disasters.
In the end of September 2024, a new disaster hit.
It is a historic hurricane in an area much less adapted to dealing with them or mitigating loss. Damage costs are likely to be very high.
On 2 October, the Administration warned that another hurricane could also hit.
1-2 hurricanes are warned to possibly go through enough of the $5 billion buffer to warrant additional appropriations for the unforeseen costs.
No one at any level of government alleges there is actually a lack of funding for the immediate response of Sep-Oct.
Directionally correct response:
The government doesn't care about spending money on people in America.
We know this because of $20 billion allocated for a 3 month period to help victims of natural disasters in America.
$15 billion is already allocated to American victims of past incidents.
The government is actively spending the $5 billion for new American victims of a historic disaster.
And the government is warning that reconstruction aid for American victims and a potential further disaster may warrant more money for American victims.
And that's bad.
Truly we should judge them by what they do.
Sure. And the system is doing what it has been doing for years if not decades without being scandalous: having enough money on hand to deal with immediate issues, and Congress then appropriating more after new disasters come about to cover the recovery.
Similarly, we could judge people by what they do... or do not do, in the case of checking available information the nature of a problem.
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How much money does the Federal Emergency Management Agency need to be allocated before it starts having some left over with which to manage federal emergencies?
It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.
There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:
Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching
No, I get it. We've set up the system of procedures such that when something like this happens we're not allowed to get mad at or fire anyone. The only lever we have is a binary vote on election year where candidates can say either yes or no to all government spending or none.
I'm reminded of the edit someone made where it says "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR A MANAGEMENT DECISION, PRETTY COOL HUH?" except it's government budgets.
If I’m reading it correctly, there’s not really anything wrong? FEMA has access to the funds it needs, and if your issue is with the money being spent on immigration related issues, that’s a directive from Congress.
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How much water needs to be poured into a bowl before the bowl starts having some water left over to be in the bowl?
Unless you intend to claim that FEMA was not appropriated money with which to manage federal emergencies, the question doesn't parse. Governmental budgets tend to work on a 'pot of money' model, in which your annual appropriation is the starting amount you have to work with. Other pots (funding codes) don't get filled to overflowing for you to get the remainder- your pot is separate from others pots (funding codes) from the start.
Competition for resources at an Agency or Ministry level generally happens within a funding code, not between funding codes. Every disaster draws from the 'manage federal emergencies' pot of money. No emergency draws from the 'facility maintenance and improvement' pot of money. When cross-pot funding gets involved, so do lawyers, because if you start allocating funds for uses they weren't appropriate for by the government, you're defrauding your own government and the audits tend not to be pleasant.
When a funding code's allocation is proving insufficient for the year, this is a normal point for legislatures to pass additional appropriations. This is generally still on the per-pot basis, and from what I've read is more or less what was already underway with FEMA.
What I'm asking is how much money do we need to shovel into this organization before it starts having enough left over after migrant expenses for hurricane response. The money we're allocating now isn't enough for the hurricane budget after other expenses. How much more money do we need to give before there's enough?
The amount of money it costs to cover hurricane costs is the amount of money it costs to cover hurricane costs. No more, and no less.
Again, your question assumes an invalid premise. There is no 'starts having left over after migrant expenses,' because migrant expenses don't come out of the hurricane response budget in the first place.
No, the money you allocated for the hurricane budget in the last appropriation months ago isn't enough for the hurricane budget after hurricane expenses.
Non-hurricane expenses had nothing to do with it, because non-hurricane expenses didn't come out of the hurricane funding code.
X-Y
The amount of money that is enough for all hurricane response expenses incurred the budget period (X), minus the insufficient amount previously budgeted for hurricane response (Y).
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Will anyone ever remember that every time the Fed prints more for handouts, it is simply stealing the value of anything else that's dollar denominated including your wallet and the rest of FEMA's budget?
I'm tired of everybody acknowledging US spending is not funded by taxes and the next day acting like nothing happened and that's still a good model for how it all works. Especially given the recent period of high inflation has redistributed wealth like nobody's business.
Inflation is only strongly redistributive if it either happens alongside or immediately after a large scale collapse in asset values. In this case the opposite happened, anyone who was rich in 2009 is much, much richer now. Anyone who was poor in 2009 is probably doing a little better, but still hasn’t had close to an opportunity to catch up. $1m in the S&P 500 in 2010 is $6m today. There’s a reason the only major new money in the ZIRP era was generated in private equity and tech.
Inflation is only not distributive if it's spread equally among money-holders. IIRC it's how economists believe it should be done, and how they assume it is being done to make the models simpler (see "helicopter money"), but it's actually never done that way.
Inflation is classically redistributive because it erodes asset prices, increases borrowing costs and raises incomes. Older, wealthier people lose relative financial standing, while younger, asset-poor ‘not rich yet’ yuppies with high earning jobs experience a relative (and often substantial) boost in financial standing. That generational redistribution hasn’t happened at all over this period of inflation because asset prices have remained sky high throughout, and are still rising. No wealthy boomer need sell his home because his cost of living has gone up, because his investment portfolio has doubled since COVID, more than making up for the impact of inflation on his expenditure.
Inflation doesn't erode asset prices (going into assets is actually the way you're supposed to respond to inflation), it erodes cash balances.
Of course, the point is that historically periods of financial upheaval (and falling inequality, or larger financial redistribution) have very little to do with inflation at all, and are instead usually more to do with wars, famine or plague.
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Inflation is classically redistributive because if you create $1000 and give it to someone, he'll be able to buy $1000 worth of stuff before the prices adjust to the new money supply. Even if the adjustment was instantaneous, the distribution of money would be skewed of in favor of the guy who got the money. The only way this doesn't happen is if you increase the supply of money without affecting it's distribution, i.e. "helicopter money".
The effects you describe are among the last to come about as result of inflation, and the redistribution doesn't even have to go the way you described. It can just as easily go the opposite way: fresh money being sunk into the stonk and real-estate markets, favoring the boomers at the expense of the young.
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Inflation is excellent for debtors, and a lot of Americans are debtors.
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You clearly missed the memo, Milton Friedman is not running the show anymore.
www.politico.com/news/2020/04/25/joe-biden-green-stimulus-207848
I refuse to believe the whole of the American elite is truly so deluded as to think this has no consequence.
They just don't care because they're asset holders close to the printing press so it benefits them.
Doesn't need to be the whole of the American elite, just enough.
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