Tony Auth is Philadelphia based, which gives this cartoon a little extra punch: The Jersey Shore took a massive hit in "We Can't Call It A Hurricane But That's What It Was Sandy" and that's a local issue for his part of the world.
The shore is back up and running, but, while some of the mine-mine-mine crew objected to using public money to bring tourists back, the area can now resume having a positive economic impact on the region.
I don't know that it's necessary to even address the tax rebels on this one, beyond, "Don't you people know how anything works?"
Maybe we can offer a compromise: Tourism will only be promoted with the industry's own funds and, in return, they won't have to pay any bed taxes, sales taxes or corporate taxes.
That's only fair, right? And it's certainly worth another $1,400 a year in your own taxes to uphold this principle, right?
Good. Now let's take a question from someone who has a chance in hell of passing this civics course.
Should we rebuild private homes in an area prone to hurricane damage? Or, more to the point, should the public pick up any of the tab for those who choose to do so?
That's a much more interesting question, and it's one that seems to come up after all sorts of disasters.
When I was a kid, there was a place called "The Land of Make Believe" in Upper Jay, NY, one of the many kids' places that were built in the post-war boom before affordable air travel made trips to Anaheim possible and made regional family parks somewhat obsolete.
But repeated spring ice-jam flooding in the Ausable River wiped it out one too many times, and its creator, Arto Monaco, eventually gave it up.
However, there are still homes in the Ausable's floodplain, and not the nice, expensive homes in that area, which are up on the hillsides.
People make snide jokes about tornados being attracted to trailer parks, but it's more the case that crappy homes are built in dodgy locations. Can we regulate construction to the point where they can't live there anymore? I don't think that's right, but maybe demanding better berms would be a reasonable accommodation.
But poor folks aren't the ones living in most beachfront communities, nor in the foothill communities of California and Colorado, where wildfires have wiped out some pretty snazzy houses.
For two years in a row, I've had a young reporter file a story about being evacuated, one from her home in the path of the Waldo Canyon fire, another from a summer camp near Black Forest, and it doesn't matter a lot to me whether the fires are part of climate change or a cyclical thing that will be over about the time those kids are my age.
I note, however, that Colorado is undertaking some reviews of building codes, and I would also note that much of the damage from Katrina was not due to the storm but due to poor maintenance of levees.
A combination of making reasonable demands on both homeowners and the government seems sensible to me. Expecting one or the other to shoulder the entire burden is foolish, but I wonder how often you could probe beyond the knee-jerk reaction and find that there isn't, in fact, a serious effort being made to find the balance.
There are things that can be done. And should be.
I don't know how far back from the seashore houses should be, or how they should be built or -- depending on how likely it is that the same stretch of beach will be hit again -- how much insurance should be paid by individuals as opposed to government.
But, if I lived in the region, I'd sure want to have that discussion, and presumably Tony Auth isn't the only person asking about it. At least, I hope he isn't.
Meanwhile, here's a story about local building practices that amuses me:
Hurricane Gilbert hit Jamaica during New York's 1988 apple harvest, which was on my beat, so I went out to talk to the pickers. They were concerned and wanted to hear from their families, as anyone would, but they weren't panicked, because they earn a decent living by Jamaican standards, and most of their houses are of cinderblock construction so will withstand the hurricane, though a tree could fall on the roof or the local road might wash out.
It's the wooden houses that get blown away in hurricanes.
Then, following the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I interviewed an expert in plate tectonics, who said that most of the Third-World housing in the Pacific zone most prone to shifts is wooden and somewhat flimsy, which means it sways in earthquakes, while cinderblock houses fall.
And, since only the rich people have cinderblock housing, this has prompted people on some islands to wonder, in the wake of a tremblor, why God is angry at the rich people.
Which is an odd twist on Bat Masterson's observation: There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. ‥. These ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the Summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both.
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