Surprising few, the proof is supplied by Nate Silver. Although Nate doesn't mention Eric by name, I'm sure most Kossacks are aware that Eric Cantor said that there should be no disaster relief without matching spending cuts, as posted by Something The Dog Said.
Nate looked at historical data for east coast hurricanes, normalized the damage to 2011 dollars, did some math, and produced the table below the Orange Squiggle of Power.
The procedure I have used to estimate economic damage — this is going to get a tiny bit technical — is to regress the logarithm of economic damage on three independent variables. The first two variables are the storm’s wind speed, and the distance of the storm from New York City, at its closest approach to Manhattan. The third variable is how many fatalities the storm caused in the Southern United States (these were significant in the cases of Hurricane Donna in 1960, Hurricane Agnes in 1972, and Hurricane Floyd in 1999), which is used as a proxy to segregate out damages caused in the South from those in the Northeast in the case of storms that made multiple distinct landfalls. The figures I am going to show you, therefore, reflect estimates of the economic damage to the Northeast from various types of hur
As you can see, two key parameters are wind speed and the distance from Manhattan. Here is the National Hurricane Center projection as of this posting.
Irene is projected to hit Long Island west of Coram, about 50 miles from Manhattan. It will make landfall somewhat more than 48 hours after the NHC projection was published. The NHC also publishes projected wind speeds, reproduced here.
As may be seen, the projection is balanced between "Cat 1 Hurricane" and "Tropical Storm". This suggests a wind speed of around 70 to 75 mph is most likely.
Looking at Nate's table and plugging in 70-75 mph at 50 miles distance, we get somewhere between $576M and $920M. Now it must be remembered that this is a projection based on estimated damage and a probable course and wind strength - in other words, this is not guaranteed to happen. But right now it's the best guess we have, so let's work with it.
Hurricane Irene will plausibly cause approximately $750M in damage.
If things get worse - a direct hit with 100 MPH winds - scale that up from $750M to $36B - a factor of 50 worse.
And Eric Cantor insists that money come from someone else who is hurting and suffering, because it can't come from rich people, and it can't be borrowed, and it can't come from defense. To help one group of innocent victims you have to hurt a different group of innocent victims, in Cantor world.
And that's pure evil. Eric Cantor is in the moral position of the Green Goblin, holding Mary Jane in one hand and a bunch of kids in the other, and telling Spider Man to choose.