Monday, March 12, 2007

How much longer will we have to carry them?

This story in the Washington Post today got me piqued. It's about FEMA's famed post-Katrina trailer parks, which us taxpayers are still paying for a year and a half after the storm. FEMA is closing one in particular--Yorkshire--and moving the refugees to other trailer parks, and predictably the people getting the free trailers are upset. Heck, I'm upset that these people still haven't done what they needed to do to run their own lives without me and the rest of us paying their rent. From the story:

"People say we shouldn't still be living in a FEMA park," said one former Yorkshire tenant, a Wal-Mart worker who wanted to be identified only as "P." "But take a look at the rents people have to pay in New Orleans now -- who can afford that?"


Well it would seem to me that you need to go out and get a better job, or failing that, a second job. And if you can't afford to live in New Orleans now, you go live somewhere else. It's not up to the rest of us to pay your rent indefinitely until an apartment opens up in your price range right where you want to live. The rest of us have to work and manage our own money to buy housing in choice areas, and I have to wonder why this woman and the others haven't been able to set aside thousands of dollars over the last year and a half since they haven't had to make any rent payments? BUt of course it's not their fault. If you ask them, it's ours.

The tenants said the sense of rootlessness that comes with the trailer life is affecting their children.

"I'm tired of tossing my kids around like a bouncing ball," LaFrance said. "And I hate waking up every day wondering what's going to happen next."


I winder if it ever occurred to her that her kids wouldn't get bounced around from welfare trailer to welfare trailer if she'd just use her own money to rent an actual apartment where her and her kids could actually set down some roots?

Nah. Sadly, the welfare crowd never seems to make that leap from dependency to self-sufficency and security. And what's even worse if that the Democrats who keep them in poverty to mine them for votes wouldn't have it any other way.

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