Thursday, June 4, 2009

Hurricane survivors may buy trailers

Hurricane Katrina was compounded by Bush meanness.

The Bush regime gave survivors a strict deadline by which they had to be out of their temporary trailers - regardless of whether they had been able to finish repairing their permanent homes.

And many weren't able to complete their repairs, because they had been scammed by crooked builders or were hamstrung by policies that Bush had enacted!

Now the deadline is passing, Bush is gone, and the era of meanness for meanness's sake is coming to a close. So the Obama administration has now taken the smart step of letting hurricane survivors buy the trailers for $5 or less. Families still in trailers also get priority for housing funds.

If you think selling the trailers for only $5 is too much of a giveaway, it isn't, considering the circumstances. If the Bush regime hadn't mismanaged the recovery effort so spectacularly, and if it hadn't allowed contractors to bilk victims, folks might not still be in trailers.

That's not to mention the circumstances that led to the flooding in the first place. The government could have spent mere pennies earlier to avoid each dollar it has to spend now. But Congress had spent a decade practically dismantling the entire government - excepting of course their massive expansion of the failed War on Drugs and their generous bailouts to airlines and right-wing talk radio.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/04trailers.html)

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