Kudlow on Katrina.

One of the reasons I love larry Kudlow is that he always manages to cut right to the heart of a situation. During yesterday's show, and this morning in an article in the national review online, he cuts through the empty rhetoric and nails one of the core issues with Katrina reconstruction. The money being spent on New Orleans "Reconstruction" is being wasted, and no actual reconstruction is getting done.

According to his analysis of the figures; if the federal government had simply made a direct transfer to the residents of New Orleans for the same amount as has already been spent, every single resident would have received a check for 425,000 dollars. Can anyone honestly tell me that the residents still living in fema trailers wouldnt have been better off if we had given them all 425 grand the day after Katrina, and called it a day? Heck even if half of that had to be spent on tax incentives or the levees, thats still 212,500 dollars per person.

Would you rahter still be waiting for the feds to help you or to have gotten a 212,500 dollar check two years ago?

On top of which NO now has the highest Murder rate in the country by a huge margin.

So why do we insist on letting the federal government screw up projects like this? When will we learn that individuals make better decisions than governments? When will we start trusting our citizens instead of the government?


$212,500 per person or empty promises, its seems like such a simple choice, so why isn't it?