Billions for New Orleans

The federal government has spent billion on New Orleans following Katrina and is planning on spending billions more.

Senator Landrieu (D-Louisiana) is asking the taxpayers to spend an additional $250 billion to “rebuild New Orleans.” This is a sizeable sum of money. Spending $250 billion over the next ten years means spending $792 every second of every minute of every hour of every day … even in the dead of night, even on Sunday mornings for the next ten years.

Looking at it another way, New Orleans official population in 2000 was 484,674. That means every man, woman and child in New Orleans will get $516,528. But New Orleans population has fallen quite a bit since then and is now estimated at 187,525. So each current resident will get $1,335,000. That’s a pretty good sum even considering these inflationary times. For a family of four, that works out to $5.34 million.

New Orleans has 188,521 homes. For that money each home will be “renovated” at a cost of $1.33 million. That seems a little excessive, but perhaps things cost a little bit more in New Orleans than they do in Tidewater Virginia.

I grant you that people lie with statistics all the time and we may not be entirely fair to Senator Landrieu (D-Louisiana). New Orleans is a special circumstance and all that. But the people who ask for - and appropriate - these kinds of sums as if $250 billion is mere pocket change and spending $1.2 million per person is reasonable – tell us that people in Washington look at the money flowing into the Treasury as monopoly money. It is not. It is worked for by real people and who give up a large part of their lives to earn the money that is pissed away by people like Senator Landrieu (D-Louisiana).

Hat tip to Dennis Gartman.