Katrina fall-out

Dylan Smith wrote:

On 2005-09-02, john smith wrote:

Stop blaming the federal government!
That's why this mess is so bad in the first place.

snip

If the Federal Government is supposed to have so little involvement,
what's the point of Louisiana being a state of the United States? What's
the point of all those Louisianans income tax that goes to the Federal
government? (the vast majority of their income taxes?)

My state tax bill is about 40% of my federal bill and if you add the
property tax I pay the state it more like 60% state 40% fed. Local
goverment should be providing more of the service in the front end and
the feds come in afterwards but I'm seeing a lack of pre-planning on the
local parts and now they are throwing up thier hands and saying Feds
come save us. Just as others have said that the storm warning was too
short for people to leave, it's the same problem for the feds. It's not
a wise usage of scarce resources to mobilize the number of people and
equipment that this is going to take on the basis of a storm that MIGHT
grow and MIGHT hit a populated area until your fairly sure where and
when it will hit. That would have been around Friday or Saturday last
week. Now could they have done a better job? Probable so, but there
are a lot of people going as fast as they can to provide aid and
unfortunately it takes some time. It's not very good for the people
that are stuck in NO. I would imagine that on the local level all
across the country that have poor and unable to prepare populations, the
local disaster prep people are looking at thier abilty to evacuate the
poor and barring evacuation how will they feed and house them for the
several days to a week that it will take to bring things in from out of
the area. I seem to recall that in the cold war days they build bomb
shelters and stocked with with supplies on the local level and those
could be used in the event of a natural disaster was well. Perhaps it's
time to try that again.