Anyone remember the Peter Sellers film "The Mouse That Roared?" The plot is basically that a tiny country is going bankrupt so they decide to declare war on the US because they know that America will then give them a ton of aid. With the windfall being planned for the hurricane victims I can only wonder if there are food stamp recipients in Oregon hoping for Mount St. Helens to blow its lid, Los Angelinos in debt begging for a quake, or guys in Connecticut behind on their mortgage payments hoping for locusts and a rain of frogs sometime soon (from Stephen Moore in the WSJ):
There's an old adage that no one in Washington can tell the difference between $1 million and $1 billion. Seldom has that Beltway learning disability been more vividly demonstrated than in the weeks since Katrina.
When President Bush announced last Thursday that the feds would take a lead role in the reconstruction of New Orleans, he in effect established a new $200 billion federal line of credit. To put that $200 billion in perspective, we could give every one of the 500,000 families displaced by Katrina a check for $400,000, and they could each build a beach front home virtually anywhere in America.
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