by the Way . . .

There they are, safe and sound. In all the discussion of the 200,000 flipping travel trailers, you may have been wondering what happened to all those “not in my neighborhood” mobile homes FEMA bought at $34,500 a throw. Turned out it was not near so bad as the critics contend. About half, the 10,000 stored at an airfield in Hope, Arkansas, are not, repeat, not sinking into the mud. Plus, they have been cleverly stacked so tightly, a la Pearl Harbor (remember storing our planes close together in the center of the air field so nobody could get to them?) that they are impossible to vandalize. Where would you stand?

The NYT, which is always exposing and criticizing our secret government efforts to do things, today reported that Katrina produced "one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history“ that cost taxpayers $2 billion or so. You wonder what they expect from an ill wind. That unfair assessment not only overlooks a lot of far more expensive bungles (you up on current affairs at all?) but completely misses the point of government. Government has two functions, to fund external economies and to redistribute income. External economies are those investments that benefit the public at large, or some politician, that would not be made if left to the private sector. For example, Grand Coulee Dam, IRAQ, or those two bridges in Alaska.

As for the redistribution of income, not much of it was stolen by the rich, so the $2 billion went mostly to people who could really use the money. It is all just an application of the trickle down theory. We are just not used to seeing it go directly to the quick witted poor.