I was listening to a guy named Tom Foreman, who at the end of an interview with Soledad O'Brien on CNN, pointed out something I've been wondering about. It's the first time I've heard anyone talk about this...
I'll tell you something nobody's talked about yet, but this is a big issue. We have effectively had, overnight, a million people, maybe more, in this country put out of work, put out of their homes...
... you're talking about a city where the banking is shut down, the insurance is shut down... This is a major American city. We haven't had anything like this. I can't recall in modern history a major American city being shut down this way. I think we're going to see in coming days discussion at the highest federal levels of even things like public works programs, because they're going to say, What are we going to do with all these people who are now wandering the South and Midwest, with their families and children, their grandparents, saying what do we do now? They have no jobs, they may not be able to access their banking, we don't know what's going to happen with insurance, they don't even know if they've lost their homes.
This is going to be enormous, and we're going to have to hear a lot of conversations about that in the coming days for all the people in New Orleans.
I think he's being wildly optimistic that this government would talk about public works programs. I very much fear that they'll be happy to just increase the ranks of the homeless.