[CFC__VRWC]

I think that is why the whiners about "my taxes won't pay one cent" get to me. Cold, stingy, mean is how they come across.

I got my fill of them last year, when the hurricanes hit Florida, three of them passing within 20 miles of my house. Week after week after week of "why should I have to pay so Granny can have air conditioning at her Bingo game", "anyone who lives in Florida deserves to lose everything they've got, and we'd better not spend one dime rebuilding it - just leave it to the snakes and the gators", etc., etc., etc. To say it got tiresome would be quite the understatement - I came real close to quitting this site for good last summer. It was very hard for me to deal with posters here running down hardworking, good people I have known and lived with for over 32 years as a bunch of morons, welfare slackers and losers.

One thing I have yet to hear any member of the "not one red cent" crowd address; let's just say the next hurricane comes along and we all suddenly see the light and decide to be as smart as you and abandon Florida forever. Like it or not, Florida is the fourth largest state in the union (by the 2020 census it will overtake New York as the third largest). It's a gigantic chunk of our national economy, and virtually irreplaceable as an agricultural resource. There are eighteen million of us living and working down here. Are you going to take us into your communities, let us take your jobs, crowd your roads and schools, buy your homes, drink your water and use your electricity, etc?

Why do I have a feeling that a huge portion of you will be telling us to stay the hell out of your communities, and that you'll still be calling us welfare bums and losers and equating us to illegal immigrants?

You want to tell me and the rest of the people in Florida (or Louisiana) where we can and cannot live, you'd better be ready to deal with the consequences. Because having us sit around waiting to die in the storm (the only way you can avoid what I touched on above) is not an option.

[cajungirl]

You have said so much better what I have been thinking.

I wonder where the statemtment "I won't pay one cent of my taxes to such and such" came from. Do people not know that we elect people to go to congress to decide how the money we all pay is spent. That one person doesn't get a veto. For good reason.

FR makes me sad lately. Not just now but for the last year or so. It seems to be a different place.

BTW my heart ached for Florida last year, I kept thinking, no more, no more.

[Conservababe]

In the "500" year flood of the Mississippi River in 1993, we heard the same whining and complaints from ignorant folks of the financial costs to them. It was the same old yada yada yada of "if they choose to live in a flood plain, why should we pay".

[GladesGuru]

"It's a gigantic chunk of our national economy, and virtually irreplaceable as an agricultural resource."

EXACTLY! ! !

Now, would you please, please tell Jebbe The Nutt that allowing Florida to buy up 1,243,000 acres in just in one decade (and that figure is actually well under the total amount) isn't doing anything to preserve private agricultural lands.

Jebbe The Nutt has signed onto the GangGreen plan to actualize the Wildlands Project in Florida - and they are well along that socialist path already.

I have nothing against emergency aid, but barring major changes in the political culture of NOLA, present aid administration will also result in prodigious waste.