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If you’ve lived in NY for a long time, it is very hard to forget this now famous, headline. I think the Daily News will be able to reuse this title page again sometime over the next month or two. NY and NJ have stuck out their hands, and requested a very lumpy $80B from Washington to cover the cost of the clean up from Sandy.
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Man is this bad timing. If granted, the cost to the Feds would be reflected in the 2013 budget. Good-bye to any hope of improvement in the overall deficit picture if this nut has to be paid. The $80b that has been requested is more than the revenue from a reversal of the +$250k Bush tax cut. It comes to $530 for every worker in America.
The 2011 Budget Control Act limits annual payments of disaster relief to $11B. So the $80B is going to require a special spending bill. That’s not going to be easy to achieve in Washington with all the Cliff/money issues that are now on the table.
NY’s big Democratic Senator, Chuck Schumer is very much in the middle of this. He knows he has problems with this request. From The Hill (Link) [4].
“There is no doubt this is going to be a hard fight. It comes in the middle of strenuous negotiations around the fiscal cliff.”
Schumer is a weasel; he also had this to say about the process of getting the necessary legislation passed:
I am working to keep the quest for Sandy aid separate from the talks and to preserve a tradition of not offsetting disaster relief.
Separate? How can you keep $80B separate? The issue of not offsetting the cost of a disaster by reducing other spending is not going to come easy. Some Republicans are going to insist that there be cuts in the budget to offset a big portion of the Sandy clean up. An aide for Eric Cantor chimed in with this:
Cantor has made clear that needs beyond the $11 billion allotted by the Budget Control Act will be properly considered.
Properly considered? That is Washington speak for, “No way in Hell”.
What ever happened to the insurance companies that we pay year after year? Did they just spend the money on Christmas parties and hope the Federal Government would foot the bills when damages became payable? Isn;t the power company required to insure its equipment? Do not municipalities have to insure their infrastructure? Yes, FEMA Disaster Aid could be LOANS until all the insurance claims can be settled and paid back, but that's IT!
ReplyDeleteThere is no $80B Bailout needed! Are these people crazy???
Oh, but I digress, yes, they truly are...
And we voted for these morons.
I am ready to go to war with the Democrats and the entitlement crowd. I see a Civil War looming.
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