Why should FEMA only help hurricane victims in a city just hit by a hurricane? "Help everyone and give some money to Boston where the weather is perfect."
FEMA isn’t supposed to be a nationwide front-line disaster management agency. It’s supposed to be a backstop for when state governments, who have the primary responsibility for disaster relief, become overwhelmed. (Put differently, nobody voted for the whole country to subsidize hurricane prone states through FEMA.) It makes total sense for FEMA to focus on disasters that could happen anywhere rather than ones that happen routinely in certain hurricane prone stages.
Why should they care when FEMA will just keep bailing everyone out, subsidized by everyone else's tax dollars. Just look at New Orleans, but now imagine it scaled up to the entire state of Florida...
You're missing or ignoring a long history of extreme poverty in the American South, and deliberate policy decisions to under-invest in those communities in order to maintain the status quo.
Nobody in this thread is proposing that FEMA help idiots in their multi-million dollar Florida oceanfront mansions that regularly get decimated by hurricanes. Those people can and regularly do bail out and return to their other homes in California or Nevada at the first sign of trouble. Your stated position is not based on reality -- most rich people do very little to help their communities.
But even ignoring this fact -- random towns along the Mississippi coast don't have a lot of lawyers or doctors or directors of engineering with overflowing bags of money to graciously spend on their community, even if such philanthropy was common (which, again -- it isn't). Everyone in those communities is poor, and struggles to get by during good times. That's what FEMA is supposed to be for.
And under-investment in FEMA's hurricane preparedness is yet another deliberate policy decision to throw these poorer communities under the bus, in favor of the wealthier communities where terrorists seeking visibility are expected to focus their efforts.
Were those places hit by a hurricane and asked FEMA for assistance?
There is definitely something to be said about economic prosperity in a lot of places, but abandoning 3.41 million US citizens after a hurricane hits doesn't seem very American.
It’s not FEMA’s job to reduce physical damage. That’s what building codes etc are for. FEMA’s job is to coordinate responses to save lives in the short term and rebuild infrastructure in the long term. Hurricanes do a lot of damage, but rarely kill people in the US.
>When things go sideways, members of the community need to be prepared. The justification for community preparedness goes up as the frequency of the concern goes up, such as with hurricanes.
That's a government: a community that pools resources, creates plans, and executes those plans to benefit the community members. I agree it would help for individuals to have emergency kits and some training. Why can't FEMA help with that?
FEMA is supposed to coordinate to aid disaster preperation, response, and recovery. They have wide ranging powers to do so because there are a wide range of disasters out there.
Suppose you have 20,000+ stranded on a tiny island in the middle of a flood. Your air lifting in supplies but there are several news helicopters in the area slowing things down. You can't tell them to go pound sand directly but you can call the FAA and get the FAA to tell them to GTFO.
These are almost all going to be, by definition, disadvantaged people who have been lied to and defrauded. Yes, they 'chose' to do this, but the staggering amount of misleading advertising (and the worst kinds of sleazy-salesman lies & emotional manipulation of the vulnerable) leaves plenty of doubt as to how much of a choice they had.
I see very little difference between helping these people and helping storm victims. Nearly all for-profit education (that made a profit, anyway) is an ugly disaster and should never have been allowed to go on so long. The government actually did something right here for once.
This is a classic problem with power; it’s not uncommon for people in power to confuse what’s good for the country with their own self interest.
It really shouldn’t be the FEMAs job to weigh disasters based on political impact; that’s not their mandate. Their job is to help with disasters, and with hurricanes being so common they should focus their efforts there.
A lot of FEMA’s work is generalizable—set up emergency shelters, evacuate people from disaster areas, provide supplies to disaster areas. Most of that stuff is pretty similar for earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, or terrorist attacks. Having more terrorism-specific funding doesn’t mean terrorism is a higher priority or greater threat than hurricanes, just that it’s more expensive to deal with.
This would work great if every state and city government was competent and good at disaster relief. In general they're not, and FEMA already rely too much on having competent local government that they can co-operate with - in particular, I get the distinct impression that a lot of the disaster relief problems in Puerto Rico which were blamed on FEMA and the federal government were actually the result of the local government being completely and utterly useless (infamously so, even).
> And don't the victims deserve organized, professional response?
Frankly, there is never enough money to hire enough people to do all the work. This is the US and we have a long tradition of neighbor helping neighbor. Many of the "amateur" responses are professional grade people. Many areas of the country are covered by volunteer fire departments.
The Red Cross often banks the money, and people should really read the authorizing legislation for FEMA since it is a more limited organization than many think.
If you are waiting for FEMA to save you your chances of survival go down dramtically. Chances are a neighbour or an average person will be there over a federal agency.
The Red Cross is a different story altogether. During the last few crisises they were caught asking for money but never spending it but kept up asking for it. Charity hording for lack of a better term means other smaller locally based charities don't receive the support they really need.
Why should FEMA only help hurricane victims in a city just hit by a hurricane? "Help everyone and give some money to Boston where the weather is perfect."
Sorry, I don't see how that makes any sense.
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