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Helene will probably be a weekly topic until every last American is rescued or buried, so I will start the conversation now with the latest updates I am aware of:
Biden has ordered "500 active-duty troops with advanced technological assets to move into Western North Carolina." I'm not sure what "advanced technological assets" they are deploying, hopefully it's something like helicopters, bridges, and drones.
There are many people asking why did he wait over a week to deploy these troops. This question is somewhat unfair in itself. In the same document Biden reminds the American people that there are already 1,000 troops on the ground (though it's not clear to me if that is across the affected region or specifically in North Carolina. The numbers he gives for National Guard is the number across Florida to Tennessee.)
I think the real complaint is not that the Federal response has been unusually slow, but that it is insufficient for the "Biblical" levels of destruction. Thousands of dead bodies, "4 Reefer Trucks" full in one county, everyone who is asking for donations asks for more body bags because they keep running out. Young kids naked and crying for their parents, ropes still wrapped around their arms from where their parents desperately tied them to trees above water. People without a roof over their heads or potable water, sewers flooded, hornets unhoused, prime matter for disease and misery. Roads and bridges gone, and no easy path to rebuilding them in the same places due to the banks and cliffs they occupied being washed out.
My husband insists that if things were as bad as I think, the US Army could get everyone out of Western North Carolina in a day. He knows more about the military than I do - he never made it past basic training due to being underweight but has two siblings in the military, one of which who has made it pretty far across 20 years of service. My husband has a very high opinion of our military's capabilities, but I wonder if his model is outdated.
In Greenville, SC, FEMA has taken over a runway with 10 helicopters that loitered all Sunday. For the past week, that runway was being utilized by private charities who were sending materials into the disaster area. Yesterday, it was out of commission for no visible or communicated reason.
Meanwhile, a Blackhawk helicopter just wrecked a distribution center in Pine Spruce (Spruce Pine?), North Carolina. Was it intentional? I hope not. But it displays a level of incompetence that boggles the mind.
All the details indicate to me that the Feds think they can just say, "X number of troops, time to deploy" and solve the problem. But there's no real leadership. No one making a plan to actually help people. The Military and National Guard is too slow and cumbersome. Private charities are able to respond quickly in a crisis, because they have a shorter chain of command and fewer rules. This might be a weakness, in that they will make more mistakes, possibly put their own people's lives at risk. But in the face of the disaster, maybe that is what is needed.
I'm sure everybody has their "issues" with the entire response, mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.
Here's Kamala bragging about sending $150 Million to Lebanon to pay back for some of the destruction that Israel enacted upon them somehow also my tax dollars indeed
Somehow the Texas Air Guard can go help with flooding in Czechia
The other "issue" is that FEMA is fullfilling the "too many chiefs and not enough Indians" meme. It seems like they want to occupy the role or "organizer", and less so doer. The local guys in ENC siphoning diesel fuel into excavators and building improvised bridges are doers, and they are looking to their local church leaders and community members as organizers. They want/need resources (money, equipment, helicopters) from FEMA, but they actively do not want to be "organized".
I've been watching this really closely and haven't seen anybody claim this. Can you link to a source for this?
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This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.
While I definitely agree with your sentiments, unfortunately the math doesn't work out.
I'll spare a Wall of Numbers-And-Links, but the reality is that too effectively insure or budget against natural disasters, even for states not named Florida and California, would mean a massive redirection of their state budgets such that they wouldn't be able to finance everyday things like roads and hospitals. Not only would voters not want that, society doesn't want that. We want basic levels of education and infrastructure pretty high. You don't want large swaths of states (large the rural parts) to be grossly less developed than the rest of the state. Culture and politics aside, this eventually results in economic degeneracy.
So, the tacit deal for decades has been that the Federal government will use its money printer for any state(s) that get slapped by a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, even large blizzard. The state just needs to keep funding its own "basics."
The rub, however, is that the funding for those basics has, over time, sourced more and more from Federal dollars. Daddy is not only paying for your expensive car insurance, he bought you the car and he pays for gas. But how? But why?
Congress can control state level funding down to absurd levels of detail. In Saving Congress from Itself James Buckley (brother of William F. Buckley) describes the absurdity of Congress, at one point, specifically allocating funds for a particular sidewalk somewhere. While the top line numbers might look impressive - "Congress gives Alabama $3 billion for Space Industry" (I'm making that data point up) ... the detail might be that that $3bn is sliced into pieces of no more than $5mn that have super specific targets.
Of course, you say, the states and closely coordinating with Congress so that what needs funding is funded, right?
No. Not only no, but fuck no. There's no state-to-House-and-Senate budget powwow where all this gets hashed out. Governors may called their senators, lobbying firms do their thing. Big profile stuff may get helped out but, generally, a lot of this is just stitched together as the process evolves in real time. And, then, it produces a horrible dilemma for the states - if they don't actually SPEND what Congress allocated, there's a good chance they'll have to answer for it and, likely, NOT receive that money again.
But, wait, it gets worse.
Tied up in Federal dollars is compliance with a bunch of Federal standards around spending those dollars. While much of this is compliance and accounting related, some of it has to do with what contractors can receive those dollars. This is everything from ensuring the contractor has compliant auditing systems all the way to, you guessed it, diversity definitely-not-quotas for the disbursal of Federal funds.
Tying this all the way back to the quoted text I led with, North Carolina doesn't have the money to fund its own disaster relief at scale. The money they get from the Federal government isn't meaningfully North Carolina's in a real sense. Instead, it's a weird pass-thru self-spend by the Feds ... with a lot of the back office support being in DC. This is the end result of a process started for sure during LBJ's admin with precedent to FDR. Your State government (with the bizarre and horrible exception of California and the just bizarre exception of Alaska) has probably invited in the grasping tentacles of Washington DC years ago and now cannot afford to cut them.
Speak for yourself. Subsidizing inefficient sectors of the economy for political reasons is ALREADY economic degeneracy.
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