Ray "Chocolate City" Nagin won the New Orleans mayoral race with 52.3% of the vote. His challenger, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, whose family the AP referred to as the Kennedy family of Louisiana, collected 47.7%.
So Ray Nagin gets a shot at the hundreds of millions of Katrina rebuilding dollars destined for Louisiana....what a debacle that spending spree will be!
When you combine the appalling lack of ethics that is already the hallmark of Louisiana politics, with the monumental incompetence of Mayor Nagin, with hundreds of millions of dollars seized from American taxpayers to pay for poor people to rebuild their shanties in a flood-prone cereal bowl, what do you get? -- The single largest waste of money since opening day of Gigli.
As much as Ray Nagin wants to make the rebuilding, but most importantly the repopulating, of New Orleans be about race...it shouldn't be. It's simply about economics. New Orleans should never have been built below sea level in the first place (lay another of history's most idiotic decisions at the feet of the French). Just because pre-Katrina N.O. was awash in entitlement-minded parasites, doesn't mean it has to be again, though I'm sure the residents of Houston wish they would go home. Ray Nagin depended on the votes of those people (many of them voted absentee but will never return) to get re-elected and he'll reward them for their votes using money from tax-paying Americans as payola. He knows that he can't get elected without the vast dependent class of needy handout consumers to whom he can play race politics.
Nagin seems to want the city to return to exactly what it was before the storm, but why not make it better, by returning those flood-prone neighborhoods to the natural swamps which buffer the city from the ocean, by discouraging the mass construction of rental property designed to attract the same jobless consumers of tax dollars who resided there before, and by letting the free housing market dictate what kinds of houses if any, get built around the city? Certainly, with insurance companies reluctant to insure homes in neighborhoods which were completely destroyed, who could afford to build an uninsured home in these areas? American tax payers should not be obligated to pay for homes to be rebuilt where they will surely be destroyed again at some point, just to fulfill Nagin's dream of a return of the Chocolate City.
Let the free market decide who gets to rebuild where. If people want to rebuild houses in a flood plain without insurance and they can afford to do so...fine. But they rebuild at their own peril. No tax payers money should be seized, when their homes are washed away again. If insurance companies calculate that they can make money by insuring high risk construction in places like the ninth ward, they will. If people calculate that it's too expensive to insure a home in a N.O. flood plain, then they can rebuild elsewhere. That's the housing-construction-insurance free market at work.
The only problem is Ray Nagin needs the poor dependent class residing in N.O. proper in order to keep his job as mayor so he will push for laws to circumvent the insurance/housing free market, and force tax-payers to cover the bill when the city gets destroyed again. And he'll cry racism if anybody objects to their tax dollars being seized to pay for somebody else's bad decisions.
Another hurricane will hit N.O. in the next few years and I predict no buses will run, the same helpless, huddled masses will be stranded and hungry in whatever replaces the Superdome, and there will once again be abandoned SUV's lining the streets that those people could have used to escape but refused to, because Ray Nagin will have told them that it's not their job to take care of themselves...their only concern will have been to vote for him every four years.
And Liberals will weep and cry and moan at the human tragedy and the loss of such an historic American city.
If you build your house in a flood plain without insurance...it's like burying yourself in the sand at low tide...eventually the tide is going to come in...and you'll get what you deserve for making such a bad decision.
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