As someone whose tax dollars will be part of that aid package, I have to object. The idea for sending money to Georgia started floating around the same time that Hurricane Gustav took aim at the US Gulf Coast. The governors of both Louisiana and Mississippi were deeply concerned about the damage that Gustav would inflict, especially on houses and other structures still unrepaired from the impact of Hurricane Katrina three years ago. At the same time officials from the Army Corps of Engineers and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans both worried about the city's levee system, which in many areas still had not fully repaired from the pounding it took during Katrina.
Three years on and we still have thousands of structures unrepaired and a major city protected by a fragile levee system, yet we are being asked to send a billion dollars to Georgia not to help them rebuild from an unavoidable natural disaster, but rather a totally avoidable conflict - one that it seems they themselves started? Wouldn't it be more responsible to spend that billion at home?
Not that I am against foreign aid, far from it. But it's one thing to provide aid for development or disaster relief, it's another to hand it out as a reward for bad decisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment