Sometimes you blunder on a case area politics, ideology, and absoluteness bang in a way that provides you with a conspicuously bright appearance of the contradictions that abuse America today.
This morning's Washington Post described a situation in the accompaniment of Louisiana area a all-around trend-climate change-is arch to a situation-rising sea levels-that YOYO (you're-on-your-own) economics can't solve.
Sea levels accept been ascent in Louisiana and they're advancing to accident a artery that's a accumulation avenue for – delay for it – oil and gas:
Highway 1, caught by levees, connects analytical oil and gas assets in booming Port Fourchon to the blow of the nation...
Local association and business leaders are ambitious that the federal government advice pay to clean and drag the actual area of Artery 1, abacus two afar to amount the levees. Federal admiral accept provided accurate and abstruse ability but will not accord allotment unless the accompaniment pledges to complete the road.
Louisiana says it doesn't accept the money.
So there's the additional problem. Admiral in a accompaniment with an advancing tax-cutting governor – Bobby Jindal can avowal of accepting pushed through the better tax cuts in the state's history – one who consistently inveighs adjoin government spending, are "demanding" the Feds forward money.
You may bethink Gov. Jindal, a Republican, created a bit of a activity a few years back. Tagged to acknowledge to President Obama's aboriginal Accompaniment of the Union address, in 2009, Jindal argued that the Feds shouldn't be spending money on the ecology of volcanoes by the U.S. Geological Survey. Instead, Jindal zinged, "what Congress should be ecology is the access of spending in Washington, D.C."
The tactic actuality is to admonish adjoin spending cuts adjoin annihilation that sounds asinine to humans - admitting of advance ecology volcanoes in actuality sounds like something you'd wish your government to do – until you in actuality charge federal help. Again appeal it.
But what if isn't there? Virtually all of the federal account cuts allowable in the endure year or so – and there's been about $2 abundance of them – accept appear from what's alleged the arbitrary ancillary of the budget, the non-entitlement allotment that's appointed anniversary year to armamentarium the agencies and yes, to accommodate "grants-in-aid" to states. This allotment of the account is far beneath cloistral from advance than the entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare, which are abundant added actual to humans (though there are some "low-information" types who accept alleged for "keeping the government out of my Medicare").
In fact, grants to states and cities are a third of the non-defense, arbitrary budget. And if, in your aberration to cut something - anything! - you carve abroad at them, while accompanying insisting on no new revenues … then, yes … you can appeal all you want, but the money won't be there.
And then, of course, there's the admirable irony here. According to the Associated Press, "Louisiana has absent about 2,100 aboveboard afar of bank and loses about 25 aboveboard afar a year. Experts acquaint that abundant of south Louisiana and Mississippi are at accident of getting absent for good." Additionally, "32 scientists – including abounding alive on the state's littoral apology efforts – told Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal that there's a absolute hotlink amid the ascent sea levels acerbic the state's bank and greenhouse gases produced by the state's industries."
Future divers, exploring the modern-day Atlantis that acclimated to be littoral America, will curiosity at our adjustment of ambidextrous with ascent sea levels: Put the highways on stilts so we could abide to carriage the deposit fuels that were causing the sea levels to rise. That is, until we ran out of drag money.
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