Some conservative Iowa bloggers didn’t take kindly to my recent post about their reaction to the floods.
Emily Geiger of Battleground Iowa seems pretty angry at the “uninformed” liberals who disagreed with her suggestion that state officials wait to see what the federal government provides before appropriating money for flood relief and reconstruction:
It seems my post was (intentionally) misinterpreted to mean that Iowans should sit on their heinies and wait for the feds to come in and fix everything.
Iowans can fix most things ourselves. It’s just a matter of who is going to pay for it all after the fact. This isn’t like New Orleans, where (I heard some relief worker on the radio the other day say that) out-of-state volunteers had to wake up residents at 10 a.m. so that the volunteers could get inside the houses where the residents then sat around and watched the volunteers work.
What would we do without conservative talk radio to reinforce our latent racist stereotypes? It’s a good thing we Iowans are not lazy like most residents of New Orleans are! We’ll have our towns fixed up in no time.
The main point of Geiger’s post, though, was that we don’t need to change state law to permit deficit spending, which would “give Supreme Iowa Democrat Mike Gronstal lots more (borrowed) money to throw around to his liberal buddies at the expense of Iowa taxpayers (and our grandchildren).” She notes that according to Krusty Konservative, state funds accounted for just 1 percent of the $1.4 billion spent on flood relief in Iowa after the 1993 floods. So by her calculation, we shouldn’t have to deplete our $600 million rainy day fund, even if much more damage was done in this year’s flooding.
Now, Krusty makes some valid points in that post, but let’s not kid ourselves. The federal government incurs huge annual deficits and is deeply in debt. Those costs are going to be passed on to our children and grandchildren.
So it’s disingenuous to pretend to be all about fiscal responsibility and living within our means if your main response to the floods is, “Let the federal government pay for everything.” That money comes from taxpayers as well.
Striker of In Flyover Country agrees with Geiger and with “EFJ,” a commenter on The Real Sporer who wrote:
We are missing the obvious here. We must follow some logical course of action:
1. Assess actual costs of flood recovery.
2. What costs are responsibility of the whole? (I hate to say government, because government is us and only has money they confiscated from us.)
3. What costs are the responsibility of the individualprivate sector?
4. Evaluate what should reasonably be done. (not all buildings, homes, businesses, and schools have some absolute right to be rebuilt. Prioritizing is ok)
5. Figure out how to pay for the work.
a. $600 million rainy day fund. No coincedence [sic] the name fits. It is a term started in our agrarian society to describe dealing with flooding.
b. CUT SOME FAT!!!
(I know, I know, there’s no fat in government. Every program is important as it buys another constituency group of “looters” for liberals)
The problem can be solved without borrowing, but it won’t because liberals will employ their hyperbole and make this about caring for the poor, and disenfranchised, the children, and the elderly.
The best way to to care for the future of Iowa is to NOT incur debt if at all possible.
Well, obviously, the costs of flood recovery will be assessed, including which costs are the responsibility of the individual/private sector.
And obviously, not every building will be rebuilt, just as Johnnie’s Vets Club in Valley Junction and the Holiday Inn on Fleur Drive were not rebuilt after the 1993 flooding. No one, not Chet Culver, not Mike Gronstal, and not David Yepsen, has said we must borrow enough money to rebuild every structure that was damaged in the floods.
Republicans always talk about “cutting the fat” as the answer for every budget problem, but sometimes, when a major calamity strikes, there just isn’t enough fat to cut.
As I said in my earlier post, it’s quite telling that Yepsen, who never met a tax cut he didn’t like and loves to write columns about fiscal responsibility, recognizes that we probably will need to borrow to address some of the flood reconstruction costs.
Most economists, even conservative Republicans, understand the need for deficit spending under some circumstances–for instance, to prevent a recession from becoming a depression. I believe even President Bush has made that argument to justify his own administration’s deficit spending.
We’re not going to rebuild Iowa’s infrastructure, homes and businesses without deficit spending. The question is whether all the deficit spending will be at the federal level, or whether the state may also have to go into debt to get the job done quickly and comprehensively.
Iowa is fortunate in that both our U.S. senators have a lot of seniority, which should help us secure a large amount of federal funding. But I would be very surprised if federal disaster aid proved sufficient.
Even if it did, I don’t think a special legislative session is a bad idea. Iowa’s elected officials need to do the assessing and prioritizing that EFJ was talking about. I understand why that worries the conservative bloggers, because they don’t trust Democrats to do anything. But it is not “politicizing the floods” to convene our elected officials to deal with an enormous natural disaster.
One more thing jumped out at me in Krusty’s post. It’s amazing how “konservatives” see lowering corporate taxes as the solution to every problem (in this case, the problem of how to keep flood-damaged businesses from relocating outside Iowa).
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