Now Louisiana’s Pols Want $250 Billion in Katrina Aid

There is no limit to the (please, let’s call it by its correct name) politically opportunistic greed (HT Porkopolis), and no better way to destroy the goodwill of the rest of the country:

Louisiana’s lawmakers submitted a $250 billion wish list to Congress yesterday, asking the federal government to cover everything from rebuilding communities to killing mosquitos and paying homeowners’ mortgages in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

At this moment, part of me wants the City of New Orleans to be totally evacuated once and for all, and then be allowed to slide right into the Gulf. We might get off spending less that way.

Assuming 2.5 million affected Louisianans, Porkopolis calculates the wish list as $100,000 per affected person. I believe the correct number of truly affected Louisianans may be closer to 1 million; if so, it’s really on the order of a quarter million dollars per person…just in Louisiana.

Memo to Porkopolis: Not everyone in the 31 counties was adversely affected in a significant way by Katrina.

Memo to Mary Landrieu and Louisiana pols: Shut, up, already.

Assuming equivalent damage in other affected states, I suppose their wish list could be about the same in amount, and would be make the grand total Gulf Coast wish list about $500 billion. But note that Mississippi, which may have suffered just as much damage (attempts to find a breakout of MS vs. LA damage have so far been unsuccessful), has not submitted a request.

This outrageous bid for open-ended federal dollars should, but probably won’t, end the debate over continuing government-funded terrorism insurance which is set to expire at the end of the year. Can you imagine how big the requests from the Mary Landrieu types would be if a dirty bomb killed 50,000 people, levelled half of a city, and made half of a state temporarily uninhabitable? If forced to pay up on terrorism insurance, the government would literally go broke, and it would set the stage for the supposedly unthinkable (coup, insurrection, revolution, etc).

There has to be a point at which people simply have to accept that “stuff happens.” I personally think $62 billion was past that point. The Louisiana politicians’ $250 billion wish list is an insult to the rest of the country.
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UPDATE: Club for Growth says that the $250 billion request is on top of, and separate from, the $62 billion Congress has already appropriated.

UPDATE 2, September 27: Proving that Louisiana’s pols have managed to alienate everyone, including their usually sympathetic friends in the liberal press, a Washington Post editorial (”Louisiana’s Looters”; requires registration) rips away:

THE NATION is at war. It is mired in debt. It has been hit by floods and hurricanes. In the face of this adversity, congressional leaders have rightly dropped proposals for yet more tax cuts, and some have suggested removing the pork from the recently passed transportation bill. But this spirit of forbearance has not touched the Louisiana congressional delegation. The state’s representatives have come up with a request for $250 billion in federal reconstruction funds for Louisiana alone — more than $50,000 per person in the state. This money would come on top of payouts from businesses, national charities and insurers. And it would come on top of the $62.3 billion that Congress has already appropriated for emergency relief.

Like looters who seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two, the Louisiana legislators are out to grab more federal cash than they could possibly spend usefully. For example, their bill demands $7 billion for rebuilding evacuation and energy supply routes, but it also demands a separate $5 billion for road building and makes no mention of the $3.1 billion already awarded to the state in the recent transportation legislation. The bill demands $50 billion in community development block grants, partly to get small businesses going, but it also demands $150 million for a small-business loan fund plus generous business tax breaks. The bill even asks for $35 million for seafood marketing and $25 million for a sugar-cane research laboratory. This is the equivalent of New York responding to the attacks on the World Trade Center by insisting upon a federally financed stadium in Brooklyn.