PAY NOW OR PAY LATER

After I blogged "Environmentalists Be Damned!" (4-10-09), I received the following e-mail:

"Just to make sure I have this straight, because you and others, myself included, chose to buy homes in a hurricane-prone area we should now spend billions of tax dollars to build a flood gate to not only protect our investment but also to subsidize a bunch of developers so they can get rich building overpriced housing. And we want all the taxpayers of the US to help us do this. Sounds about right, environment be damned. Way more than two sides to this."

What a bunch of illogical horseshit! Throwing a guilt trip on us for buying a home in a hurricane-prone area just doesn't fly. Most of us do not live on or even near ocean-front property. We moved to the Houston-Galveston area because that's where the jobs were.

According to the sender's line of reasoning, no one should have bought a home in a hurricane-prone area. That means no one should be living within a 100 miles of the Gulf of Mexico's shoreline and no one should be living within the whole State of Florida. Furthermore, with that line of reasoning no one should be living in the Midwest and the South because they are tornado-prone areas, and no one should be living in California because it is an earthquake-prone area.

The sender does not think taxpayers should have to pay for the massive floodgates proposed by Texas A&M professor William Merrell, floodgates that will protect thousands and thousands of homeowners in the Houston-Galveston area. Well, I've got news for him! The $5 billion price tag for building the flood gates and for extending existing seawalls and building new seawalls is chicken feed when compared to the cost of a major hurricane. And who does he think ends up paying for much of the devastation left behind by hurricanes, if not the taxpayers?

The taxpayers have paid billions for the devastation brought about by - just to name three hurricanes - Hurricane Andrew in Florida, Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, and Hurricane Ike. If a future hurricane were to score a direct hit on Galveston Island, the cost to taxpayers would far exceed the cost of building the seawalls and floodgates proposed by Prof. Merrell.

And what about those evil get-rich developers with their overpriced housing? That complaint sure sounds like something straight out of a far-left playbook. Even if there were to be absolutely no further development along the Gulf Coast, the cost to taxpayers will be astronomical every time another hurricane strikes our shores.

On this Tax Day, it all boils down to this - taxpayers can pay now for property protection or pay much more later for property losses. Spending up to $5 billion to protect the residents of and the property along the Texas coast makes damn good fiscal sense, the "lefties" and environmentalists notwithstanding.