The President's prime-time "Katrina Comeback" address was vintage Bush. Primarily designed to help him, and not the Gulf States, recover from his administration’s disastrous bungling of the Katrina response, Bush's speech offered to shower money on the devastated South. But in his typical fashion, George W. Bush held no one accountable and shunned independent oversight of the response and the rebuilding. Most of all, the Free Lunch President refused to ask the American people to pay for it.

Let's start with America’s pocketbook. The costs to rebuild the Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are staggering. President Bush estimated the budget would top $200 billion. (Congress has already appropriated over $60 billion.) A proposed reconstruction program offered by the Louisiana congressional delegation would easily top $100 billion, with $50 billion in community development grants and $34 billion in coastal and levee maintenance and protection programs.

The American public is prepared to dig deep to pay those costs. 56% of those surveyed in a CBS/New York Times poll said they would pay more in taxes to fund the Katrina recovery. A whopping 73% of respondents claimed that rebuilding New Orleans was more important than cutting taxes.

But just as in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, President Bush asked for no sacrifices from Americans willing and ready to make them. Unsurprisingly, Bush did not call for the new taxes to fund his Katrina recovery program. Inexcusably, Bush said nothing about the postponement of further tax cuts during a time of war, national disaster recovery and endless $300 billion deficits. Instead, the President and his party will seek to make his 2003 tax cuts permanent, including the repeal of estate tax. This may be New Orleans’ time of need, but for President Bush, America's wealthiest are needier still.

Making matters worse is the absence of safeguards in Bush's address to protect against the cronyism, fraud, and corruption so endemic in his administration. President Bush's team has a proven track record of budgetary chaos and sweetheart deals when such massive rebuilding budgets are involved. $9 billion went missing during the reign of Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. During the $12 billion Florida hurricane recovery process in election year 2004, the FEMA of George Bush and Michael Brown spent over $30 million on an untouched Miami-Dade County, and paid for hundreds of funerals despite a statewide death toll of roughly 100 people. Already, Bush and GOP friends Halliburton, Bechtel and firms represented by former FEMA Joe Allbaugh have received contracts for Katrina rebuilding, a development that does not augur well for American taxpayers. In sharp contrast with the President's lone mention of a team of inspectors general, the "Marshall Plan for the Gulf Coast" offered by Harry Reid and Senate Democrats rightly includes an "ethics watchdog" to prevent the kind of fraud that President Bush is inviting.

Perhaps most glaring in the Bush address, though, was the President’s refusal to take accountability for the calamitous response of his government to Katrina. While the President claimed "I want to know all the facts" and that "I am responsible for the problem and for the solution," no Bush administration official has been fired. None has been sacked, not even ex-FEMA head Michael Brown or his boss, Michael Chertoff, the DHS Secretary who waited two days until after Katrina hit to issue a memo naming Brown as the point man for the federal response. Typically, President Bush did not call for an independent commission. (As in the cases of 9/11 and Iraq WMD intelligence, rest assured he will quietly flip-flop later, limiting the scope and timing of the investigations, and then coopting credit for the findings.) As expected, Bush instead endorsed the defanged inquiries established by the GOP leadership in the House and Senate.

In a nutshell, Bush's recovery from Katrina is just what we've come to expect: almost unlimited – and unfunded - federal largesse, with no accountability for past mistakes or independent oversight for the future. Laissez les bons temps rouler, indeed.

UPDATE (9/16): As predicted, President Bush confirmed today that he will not seek any tax increases to pay for the post-Katrina costs of rebuilding the Gulf States.

—Perrspective 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) |