Corp of Engineers
Read even a portion of this painfully left leaning piece on how the corps of engineers totally screwed up the levee system in New Orleans and then tell me how pumped you are to let government manage everybody’s health care.
NEW ORLEANS STILL MIGHT HAVE FENDED off Katrina if its levees hadn’t played matador defense. After Hurricane Betsy pummeled New Orleans in 1965, Congress assigned the Corps to protect the city from a 100-year storm. The agency’s first mistake was calculating that 100-year event as a modest Category 3 hurricane, even though Betsy had been a 4, and the National Weather Service later proposed a more severe 4. The Corps then made such egregious engineering errors that it wasn’t even ready for a smaller storm. For example, its levees sagged as much as 5 ft. (1.5 m) lower than their design because the Corps miscalculated sea level and then failed to adjust for subsidence. Some were built in soils with the stability of oatmeal. “These were inexcusable, lethal mistakes,” says University of California, Berkeley, engineering professor Robert Bea, who led a post-Katrina investigation for the National Science Foundation. The Corps also built most of its levees around swampland, a conscious effort to promote the development of low-lying subdivisions like New Orleans East. That no longer seemed like such a good idea after New Orleans East went underwater during Katrina. “That should be the first lesson: build levees around people, not around wetlands,” says Paul Harrison of Environmental Defense.
The basic problem is that protecting New Orleans from deadly storms was never anyone’s top priority. That’s why the city’s main hurricane project was 37 years behind schedule when Katrina hit. Louisiana’s congressional delegation steered Corps funds toward boondoggles that had nothing to do with flood protection, like a $2 billion effort to channelize the Red River for barges that never materialized. Stingy local officials actually helped scuttle a Corps plan to build pumps and floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain, a plan that could have prevented much of Katrina’s flooding. “We can beat ourselves up about the past–or we can use the past to do business differently in the future,” says Corps Colonel Jeffrey Bedey, who is now overseeing construction of, yes, huge pumps and floodgates along Lake Pontchartrain. “I don’t just mean we the Corps. I mean we the country.”
Can’t wait for the ‘corp of health care’ to determine how billions dollars should best be spent on protecting my health. I just hope the legislation will enable even more pork barrel projects than the corp of engineers currently provides.
It’s odd cause some argue that things like education are to important to left up to the markets. The result? High School graduate rates have remained unchanged in thirty years while cost has increase significantly. Over the same period microwaves came into existence and were refined with more features while costing less to produce. In some wired way, by using government to ‘protect’ valuable things in society from free markets what seems to be valued becomes inverted. An outsider comparing education to microwave would have no choice but to conclude we care more about microwaves than education.
August 31st, 2007 at 8:06 am
Wow, so many responses.
1: I’m sure the corps of engineers did a great job, it’s just that damn biased MSM lying about it to get their story. (btw, I’ll have a lot of fun if you seriously want to treat MSM reports as valid whenever they support your position)
2: What’s your position on a government-funded voucher system for healtch care? So the government isn’t running any healthcare facilities, just making sure everyone can pay for them.
3: If you ant to compare education to improvements in microwaves, you shouldn’t be looking at graduation rates, you should be looking at the quality of education of those that do graduate. From talking to my dad, I know I was learning math and science in my last few years of HS that he didn’t get until his second year of college back in the 70s.
4: As I’ve said before, the differnce between microwaves and education is whether or not the person making the purchasing decision is the person affected by it. Consumers will buy themselves quality products, but they have a much harder time telling if they’re getting somethign good when they’re buying something for someone else.
Once private schools start running targetted advertisements and billboards just like other companies, I don’t think parents (ie all parents on average, not just the few who are super-interested and do a ton of research) will be any better at telling how good their kids school is than someone in the local government who gets actual reports and does this as their actual job.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:09 am
1. Believe me it was very clear Time magazine had an agenda with that story. The most prominent themes:
1) PhD educated know how better to plan for a catastrophe than engineers
2.) its man’s attitude of controlling the environment that was the largest cause for catastrophe.
If we just listen to experts that want us to leave the environment alone New Orleans would of been better off. Don’t get much more liberal than that. I address this in the post as I noted that the piece was ‘painfully liberal’. I should also note the actual coverage of the immediate aftermath of the storm was arguably the MSM lowest point in terms of covera
ge. Reality be damned, they wanted to play the race care and did so unabashedly.
2. Seriously you really need to think about what you are saying. The expression ‘government-funded’ for me, translates, ‘taxpayer-funded’. The biggest problem with healthcare right now is all the regulations and tax rules that insulate the payer from the cost. You really want to fix health care? Remove all the rules that encourage insulating the payer from the cost.
To answer your question: If its your money fine with me. Voucher all day long. However before i would even remotely consider a voucher program with my money your going to have to bust up the rules and regulations to get more free market action in that industry. That would be the only way you could reasonably expect to see the vouchers have a positive effect on the industry while at the same time help the so-called poor.
3. Change in curriculum is not even close to a measure in quality. Educators have been arguing for years that its a lack of money that has lead to poor quality in education. I believe we have increased education spending by a factor of 8 times and have seen any scant evidence that it has improved. This is most painfully the case in inner city schools in which minorities are disproportionally affected by poor education.
4. Your statements here borders on being incoherent. You freely admit that
‘Consumers will buy themselves quality products, but they have a much better harder time telling if they’re getting something good when they’re busying something for someone else’.
In this case bureaucrats are purchasing education on behalf of the citizens. Its hard to understand bureaucrats as anything but consumers buying something for someone else. Which by your own admission is problematic.
But its worse, because education bureaucrats are purchasing education for someone else but they are using someone else money to do so. Those in charge of education are just about as removed from consequence of such decisions as one can get. It easily explains why feeding the education beast more money has no effect on improvement of quality. It explains why microwaves have improved significantly over the last 30 year while education has remained largely unchanged.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:33 am
2. I’m fine with using the phrase taxpayer funded if it makes you feel bette,r and yes I’m just asking about the voucher program, not a heavily-regulated system including couchers. I agree that we probably need some smart deregulation in the healthcare industry.
More significantly, though, your point here mirrors my own in point 4: insulating the consumer from the cost decreases the quality of the product. I’m postulating that, additionally, insulating the consumer from the product itself- like in our current healthcare system, where employers choose a healthcare p[lan for their employees which they themselves aren’t on. Or a private education system, where parents pick out schools that they themselves don’t go to.
3. I’m not talking just change in curriculum, but change in what an average graduate knows and how well they can apply it. No matter how good microwaves get, some number of people will put metal in them and break them; no matter how good schools get, some number of kids will be disinterested and drop out.
You’re measuring working microwaves against failed students, so of course it looks bad for education; it would be just like measuring working microwaves against broken toaster ovens.
4. I’m making 2 distinct claims here, so maybe they should have been broken up for clarity.
You seem to agree with the first point, which is that schools can’t get the full benefit of free markets, because the kids who actually go to the schools aren’t the ones making the purchasing decisions (ie, the consumer is insulated from the product).
My second point is that I don’t think the average parent would be any better at finding good schools than the average local government. You disagree, because while both the parent and the beauracrat are insulated from teh quality of the product, the bearuacrat is additionally isolated from the cost, and therefore more removed from the consequneces of decisions. I have 2 rebuttals to this:
1. Being insulated from the cost of education probably explains why education spending can skyrocket liek it has, but I don’t see how it would affect the quality of the education. Quality and cost seem like seperate factors in this formulation (since you’ve specifically dissociated them by saying that costs went way up without improving quality).
2. Under a voucher program, parents would also be insulated from the costs, since they’d be getting the money to pay for it from the government. So I’m not sure what the difference between the parent and the beauracrat would be along that dimension.