Louisiana Sees $$$$ in Reconstruction Requests

Just what exactly does Louisiana want from the rest of the country in its reconstruction request? About $250 billion, give or take a billion (or 10).

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. . . . The Louisiana delegation has apparently devoted little thought to the root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. New Orleans was flooded not because the Army Corps of Engineers had insufficient money to build flood protections, but because its money was allocated by a system of political patronage.

Considering that the same politicians did little to address crumbling infrastructure before the hurricanes hit, failed to address key needs after the hurricanes hit, and have generally done a poor job on both sides of the aisle in Louisiana for decades, giving them this stupendous sum of money would be disasterous.

Louisiana legislators in Congress have decided this was the time to lard up on every pet project one can possibly imagine. They want block grants of tens of billions of dollars, and then name specific projects for tens of millions more, which would ostensibly be included in the block grant. Then, there's the projects that have absolutely nothing to do with rebuilding infrastructure at all:

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.

Disgraceful doesn't even begin to cut it. And it gets worse:

Rather than grappling with the lessons of Katrina, Louisiana's representatives are demanding an astonishing $40 billion worth of Corps of Engineers projects in their state. That is 16 times more than the Corps says it would need to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane.

Curious indeed. Just who thought that a pork laden bill was a good idea?

via Instapundit.