Bleeding Heartland has been sparring with some Iowa Republican bloggers about the appropriate policy responses to the recent catastrophic flooding (see this post and this follow-up).
Here are some things I have learned.
Convening a special legislative session to address Iowa's flood relief, clean-up and reconstruction needs would be an example of Democrats "politicizing the floods." State officials should wait to see what the federal government does before taking those steps.
But this does not imply that Iowans should "sit on their heinies and wait for the feds to come in and fix everything." We are better than that:
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.
When the legislature does convene, it would be wrong for the state of Iowa to borrow money to invest in reconstruction.
Instead, we should cut fat out of the budget, such as excessive spending on education.
Also, we should cut corporate income taxes to discourage flood-damaged businesses from moving to new communities or out of state.
Any questions?
P.S.--The real lessons I learned were:
- Conservatives love to trot out their fake fiscal responsibility. In this case, Iowa bloggers make a big deal out of needing to live within our means and not pass on debt to our children and grandchildren. But their response to the floods amounts to, "Let the (deeply-indebted, huge-deficit-running) federal government pay for as much as possible."
- Republicans will offer corporate tax cuts as a solution to any problem.
- When the going gets tough, count on right-wing talk radio to make people feel better by reinforcing their latent racist stereotypes.