Ground Zero Economics

[Tak]

Do you think the federal government should bear more of the expenses of cleaning up after the World Trade Center? Including but not limited to: overtime pay for police, fire, and EMT; long-term air quality monitoring; grief counselors; physical rebuilding of damaged public infrastructure (streets, bridges, subways); hospitals and mortuaries; added ferry service to compensate for lost trans-Hudson subways; lost wage taxes due to jobs displaced to NJ; etc.? Originally $30 something billion was pledged, but the city has only received $10 billion so far. I have no idea what the total rebuilding will eventually cost (not including what may or may not end up as insured private property).

[SimpleSimon]

No.

[MAC]

hold on!

that's too easy simon

you are supposed to rant about how we measure the lost revenue of a true capitalisitic society where the competition of those businesses in the WTC would have absorbed part of the economic blow including reemployment of workers through expansion and projects to cover the now vendorless customers.

or how the japanese donated money and the french donated money, etc, etc to pay for those firemen and police officers...the ones that tak has pointed out ar ebeing considered being paid for by the fed.....

my logic is simple
if the fed has to dip into its large budget (the one with a deficit) to pay for NYC's local first responders then NYC should be asking for its citizens taxes to be cut so they can generate their own revenue to handle its own problems.

this whole concept of government matching funds upsets me. Many gov't programs are at 3:1 matching. If TX comes up with $3M for headstart (a child program originally geared towards some sort of education crap that proved to be very effective at making sure they had shots and stuff) the fed gives $9M to match.

That means they have $9M of someone's money that they are giving to us...as far as I'm concerned either it was my money the first time or they are giving me someone else's hard earned funds.
either way, it's wrong

k, that's my opinion....for what its worth