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This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.
I’d say this is a great case for government intervention. It’s particularly close to the core Constitutional mandate.
Plus, look how much of the relief is being coordinated through one state’s airport. I think forcing everyone to duplicate logistics would be less efficient.
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While I definitely agree with your sentiments, unfortunately the math doesn't work out.
I'll spare a Wall of Numbers-And-Links, but the reality is that too effectively insure or budget against natural disasters, even for states not named Florida and California, would mean a massive redirection of their state budgets such that they wouldn't be able to finance everyday things like roads and hospitals. Not only would voters not want that, society doesn't want that. We want basic levels of education and infrastructure pretty high. You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.
So, the tacit deal for decades has been that the Federal government will use its money printer for any state(s) that get slapped by a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, even large blizzard. The state just needs to keep funding its own "basics."
The rub, however, is that the funding for those basics has, over time, sourced more and more from Federal dollars. Daddy is not only paying for your expensive car insurance, he bought you the car and he pays for gas. But how? But why?
Congress can control state level funding down to absurd levels of detail. In Saving Congress from Itself James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) describes the absurdity of Congress, at one point, specifically allocating funds for a particular sidewalk somewhere. While the top line numbers might look impressive - "Congress gives Alabama $3 billion for Space Industry" (I'm making that data point up) ... the detail might be that that $3bn is sliced into pieces of no more than $5mn that have super specific targets.
Of course, you say, the states and closely coordinating with Congress so that what needs funding is funded, right?
No. Not only no, but fuck no. There's no state-to-House-and-Senate budget powwow where all this gets hashed out. Governors may called their senators, lobbying firms do their thing. Big profile stuff may get helped out but, generally, a lot of this is just stitched together as the process evolves in real time. And, then, it produces a horrible dilemma for the states - if they don't actually SPEND what Congress allocated, there's a good chance they'll have to answer for it and, likely, NOT receive that money again.
But, wait, it gets worse.
Tied up in Federal dollars is compliance with a bunch of Federal standards around spending those dollars. While much of this is compliance and accounting related, some of it has to do with what contractors can receive those dollars. This is everything from ensuring the contractor has compliant auditing systems all the way to, you guessed it, diversity definitely-not-quotas for the disbursal of Federal funds.
Tying this all the way back to the quoted text I led with, North Carolina doesn't have the money to fund its own disaster relief at scale. The money they get from the Federal government isn't meaningfully North Carolina's in a real sense. Instead, it's a weird pass-thru self-spend by the Feds ... with a lot of the back office support being in DC. This is the end result of a process started for sure during LBJ's admin with precedent to FDR. Your State government (with the bizarre and horrible exception of California and the just bizarre exception of Alaska) has probably invited in the grasping tentacles of Washington DC years ago and now cannot afford to cut them.
Speak for yourself. Subsidizing inefficient sectors of the economy for political reasons is ALREADY economic degeneracy.
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The left has been running the "blame your political opponents for bad weather" play for 20 years, but that doesn't make it any less stupid when the right does it.
20 years? People blamed the federal government for the 1906 San Fran quake.
People have been blaming their political opponents for bad weather since we've have political opponents and bad weather
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I think MITE is referring to hurricane severity being (potentially) worsened by anthropogenic climate change.
I figured it was referring to Katrina.
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