Your Tax Cuts at Work

That would make a good sign for a particularly potholed stretch of road.

Or a levee in poor nick.

It has been well reported that part of the reason for the levee catastrophe in New Orleans was the diversion of funds from engineering efforts on the levees to the Iraq war. And it has been four years since 9/11—if anything this disaster proves is the uselessness of that stepchild the Department of Homeland Security, which has only obfuscated disaster preparedness in this country.

But the roots of this disaster certainly predate Bush, if not Bushism. I’m livid at the culture of the Tax Cut.

I graduated from a public high school in California in 1981, and always have felt I received a good education there. But that was a matter of timing. In 1978, the voters of the state passed Proposition 13, an initiative limiting property tax increases, all in the name of tax relief. Ever since then, funding for education, and many other things, plummeted, and the California public school system devolved into a sorry mess. My own school district would be bankrupt less than a decade after I graduated.

Infrastructure. You guys—that’s what government is meant to provide. And guess what, that takes tax money.

Pica tells me that the head of infectious disease at the UCD Medical Center has just headed off to New Orleans. I don’t even want to contemplate what our failure to invest in infrastructure has done to the public health system of the Gulf Coast. I imagine it has been barely getting by in normal times, and is now completely overwhelmed by this crisis.