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> Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group ... said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of d
by dfee 8y ago
> Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group ... said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers.
“I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
Summed up as: “I think our unsustainable way of life should be subsidized by the rest of the country at a 3:1 rate”.
I enjoy NOLA, but how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale?
- fwip 8y agoHundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget. Federal dollars subsidize all kinds of local and regional infrastructure.
- echelon 8y agoWhat else could be funded with hundreds of millions of dollars? Opportunity cost.
- loktarogar 8y agomoot point when you consider that military spending takes up more than half of the budget
- jjoonathan 8y agoNope. It takes up about a third of the budget and is itself in large part a social program.
- chii 8y agoa "social" program for defense contractors. I m sure they are hurting, and need to make more money.
- jjoonathan 8y agoA social program for able bodied men and women willing to work for a living. It's how my father escaped poverty.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoA social program would be building schools, bridges, improving access to education, funding research for medicines to be put in public domain so it’s affordable. Adding a 12th aircraft carrier or developing an unnecessary fighter plane is not a social program.
- jjoonathan 8y agoNot everyone joins the military because the alternative is absolute shit, but it often is, and they often do. It is absolutely a social program in that sense, and if you cut it, your other social programs are going to have to take up the slack. You have to de-rate the "win" from cutting it accordingly.
- nhebb 8y agoIt's far lower than that. There's a fake pie chart floating around the internet showing Defense at 57% of the federal budget. For 2019, the real number was 12%. In previous years it was about 15%.
- kasey_junk 8y agoIt depends on how you categorize things. The 50% numbers come from discretionary budgets & are accurate. But ‘most’ federal spending is not discretionary. It’s old people care.
- nhebb 8y agoDiscretionary spending is about 1/3 of the budget, and, yeah, defense is half of that, but when the GP wrote that "military spending takes up more than half of the budget" it paints a misleading picture.
- burfog 8y agoThere really isn't any non-discretionary spending. The closest we have is payments specified in international treaties, and even that can simply not be paid. All the rest is just a couple congressional votes and a presidential signature away from being eliminated.
- nhebb 8y agoMedicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are considered mandatory spending because politicians tend to like being reelected.
- kasey_junk 8y agoThat and it doesn’t go through the standard appropriations process.
- jayess 8y ago~16%: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWasteful spending is wasteful spending. Buy the land, condemn it, and call it a day.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoThe price to buy and condemn New Orleans > hundreds of millions of dollars.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoNot if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion. To pay more today is a transfer to those whose land is expected to lose value in the future from sea levels rising. It cost $100 million already (with an additional $400 million planned) just to keep the water out of Miami Beach (with another ~$3 billion in expected costs due to septic and well failures in Miami proper), some of the most valuable real estate in the country. NOLA is not Miami Beach/Miami (value-wise). At some point, we have to stop throwing good money after bad.
- ggm 8y agoNot if you defer additional infrastructure spending until the land has declined in value from water intrusion. Insurance is going to pick up some of this until the land is declared un-insured. so, some parts of the relocation cost will be socialized if you like it or not, because premiums will rise in the market to offset this cost.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoPolicies will be outright cancelled before that happens, except through the national flood insurance program, which could be used to slowly migrate folks out over time. But let's not think that some sort of twisted Manifest Destiny requires we pour hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into New Orleans when there are other options available. The only thing that is constant is change. We must be willing to adapt.
- dfee 8y agoThe key to my comment was the last clause “at any kind of scale”. If the community living there can’t support the costs of environmental maintenance, at a certain point it becomes like a superfund site: people will need to move to higher ground. In NOLA, in Houston, in Miami and beyond.
- js2 8y agoWhat about the forest fires in the West and even places like NC? Overflowing rivers throughout the US? Tornadoes from the mid-West to the mid-Atlantic? Hurricanes? Where in the US is safe as climate change induces more frequent and more extreme weather-related disasters?
- godzillabrennus 8y agoOhio seems reasonably safe. Maybe Cleveland will see real estate prices go up for the first time in 20 years?
- scruple 8y agoDepends on where... I have family in southern/central Ohio and, while they've always been a risk, there has been a marked uptick in the occurrence of tornadoes. Xenia, OH very famously has been hit multiple times by serious tornadoes. Where my parents are, where I did most of my growing up, in southeastern Ohio, is a little safer because of the Appalachian foothills, but I fondly remember the tornado sirens blaring every Wednesday at noon during the spring, summer, and fall. A friend of mine from high school, who is a meteorologist and storm chaser today, was telling me the last time that we spoke that tornado alley is potentially / actually shifting eastward over time. I haven't tried to verify what he was saying, because I trust him given his career choices, but it does seem to bear out from the anecdata that I have available.
- madengr 8y agoTornados cut a narrow swath, compared to a hurricane. I’d wager all the tornados in the last 100 years cause less total economic damage than a single hurricane hitting a coastal city.
- MR4D 8y agoSure, it’s small in the singular. But what happens after you get yours, and I get mine, and so one. That’s not affordable.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y ago> Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget. That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be. When you listen to old radio, you get the impression people actually cared about how money was spent and didn’t casually write off millions of dollars, just because “that’s the budget.” Why are people these days willing to let the government drop millions of dollars so casually? Take for example this episode of Johnny Dollar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE (1956). The way the people in this episode are pissed off about their money being wasted, you’d think it was some other country. When did people become OK with wasting money like this?
- tedivm 8y agoNOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment. Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.
- zaroth 8y agoThank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation. The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.
- dmitryminkovsky 8y agoHey didn’t say anything about NOLA or whether it “should be saved” or anything like that, just the attitude of not caring about millions of dollars just because... it’s in the budget or whatever.
- kobayashy 8y agoNOLA can't even fix the damn potholes with that revenue. It's not that NOLA residents own Marriott Inc and that good part of money stays in the city. City's budget main contributor is sadly - traffic cameras.
- conanbatt 8y agoIts not robbery if its a small part of the budget after all
- inflatableDodo 8y ago>how are we going to deal with this at any kind of scale? Get the Army Corps of Engineers to hire the Dutch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)
- jayess 8y agoIs the Netherlands sinking though?
- inflatableDodo 8y agoMost of the Netherlands only exists due to sheer bloodymindedness. Nearly 20% of it is actually below sea level.
- jayess 8y agoI understand that. But New Orleans is subsiding. It's sinking every year. It's easier to maintain levees if the land beneath them isn't sinking. I don't know why my comment is getting downvoted.
- inflatableDodo 8y agoThe Netherlands has always been sinking. They just don't seem to care and just keep making more of it. Here's their latest plans - https://www.thestructuralengineer.info/news-center/news/item/712-the-dutch-solution-to-rising-seas https://www.thestructuralengineer.info/news-center/news/item...
- Kim_Bruning 8y agoWouldn't that be nice. Sadly, levees actually contribute to the problem due to several factors (IIRC 2 factors were the blocking of silt deposition and the lowering of ground water levels). The ground water levels are something that can be managed, the silt deposition is something you need to learn to live without. Thing is, if the land wasn't sinking to begin with, exactly why were you considering levees in the first place? ;-) Whatever the case may be, if you're building levees, you need to factor in the sink rate of the land around you, among the many factors. And you need to factor in the cost to maintain them indefinitely. It's an expensive proposition; but by the simple fact that you're alive, standing there, and considering it already, chances are the ROI is worth it.
- mikeash 8y agoHow much do the Feds collect in taxes from the city each year? How much more will they collect in the future because the city floods less? A few hundred million dollars to protect a major city sounds like an incredible bargain with a great ROI.
- selectodude 8y agoNew Orleans is a pretty great place, but in no way is it a major city.
- mikeash 8y agoWhatever you want to call a metro area of over a million people with a GDP approaching $80 billion, a few hundred million to protect it seems cheap.
- thanatos_dem 8y agoWhere’s the $80B number coming from? From the sources I found (from 2017) GDP per capita is $52,536 (from Open Data Network), and population is 393,292 (US Census Bureau), giving a GDP of right around $20B. We’ve already spent 14 on it, and will continue to need to spend indefinitely, so the numbers really aren’t great.
- mikeash 8y agoMetro area, not just the city proper. https://www.frbatlanta.org/economy-matters/2015/08/20/new-orleans-10-years-after-katrina https://www.frbatlanta.org/economy-matters/2015/08/20/new-or...
- thanatos_dem 8y agoAs of 2017 Louisiana has a Balance of Payments of $17.7B, meaning they receive that much more in federal funding than they pay in taxes [1] I say it’s time to move people to somewhere above sea level and let NOLA return to being the river delta it is so desperately trying to be. [1] https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/ https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
- scythe 8y agoNew Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around. The intractable swampy surroundings have prevented it from becoming as suburbanized as most American cities; if you look at it from a satellite, there is a sharp boundary between the city and the swamp. The situation is much worse in, say, Miami. Many other coastal cities will also need levees and have uglier boundaries.
- treis 8y ago>New Orleans isn't the most unsustainable place around You can't really treat New Orleans as a single entity. The French Quarter and where the high rises are is (relatively) comfortably above sea level. The sprawl that stretches towards Lake Ponchartrain isn't. That area is well and truly screwed. They keep sinking, the sea keeps rising, and the hurricanes get stronger. There's no real solution. You can keep building the levees higher, but that's sort of like paying off a credit card with anotehr credit card. It's a temporary solution that makes the reckoning a lot worse when the piper comes calling.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peisistratos 8y agoOff the coast of Louisiana is the Mad Dog spar oil platform, installed in 2005, which at maximum production is pumping 100,000 barrels of oil a day. Louisiana receives no tax revenue from it.
- stickfigure 8y agoI'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make... I don't have a particularly strong opinion on how to allocate tax revenue in this situation, but it seems relevant to mention that the platform is 150 miles off the coast. That's 138 miles into international waters. Percentage-wise, it's... a little closer to Louisiana than Texas? Florida and Mexico are't all that far away either.
- JudgeWapner 8y agothis could be the ideal testing grounds for dealing with global sea-level rise. What's happening to new orleans is expected to happen at most low-sea-level cities relatively soon.
- Animats 8y agoNew Orleans only has about 300,000 people. There's high ground a few miles north. Relocation, not levees. Florida is worse off. Florida doesn't have much high ground.
- mirimir 8y agoIndeed. This was totally predictable. New Orleans has been sinking for centuries. And sea level rise is inevitably occurring at an increasing rate. So yes, just move everybody. There can be boat tours. Same for Florida. With porous limestone, it's a lost cause. Even New York City will be a challenge. Lots of Manhattan is built on old garbage.
- nickthemagicman 8y agoNola has the highest port tonnage in the country. The impact on GDP is estimated in the hundreds of billions. There's also billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure here. Most goods that pass through to the midwest and many through the rest of the country come through here. Without Nola, hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy will go away. Gas prices set a record after Katrina. 14 billion is a bargain to keep this city going.