September 1, 2005 - We are paying the price of George Bush’s War this morning. It is the tax nobody voted for. Tuesday noon I filled up the tank on my light truck. Like everybody else I groused about the high price I had to pay and blamed the Administration as the dials spun on the pump. At $2.55 it was 90 cents higher than I paid a year ago. On Wednesday morning the pump price was $3.29.

Oh, I know that the excuse for this price spike is the disruption of the supply wrought by the hurricane and for all his confidence George W. Bush does not control the weather. But he and the Republican Congress did control the purse strings for the five years last past. In 1995 the Corps of Engineers began a 10 year construction program to prepare the Louisiana Delta to receive a category 5 hurricane. In each year since George Bush was inaugurated his Administration has cut funding for the project to the bone.

This fiscal year the Corps asked for $27 Million for hurricane protection facilities around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush Administration cut that spending plan to $3.9 Million. The Republicans in Congress was more generous. They bumped the appropriation up to $5.7 Million. It is just one example of the kind of unessential domestic spending that had to be cut so the President could simultaneously cut taxes for his patrons and pay for his excellent adventure in the Middle East. This morning we are learning just how “unessential” that spending was. It is not just New Orleans that was devastated. It was all of us.

We are all going to have to pay the cost. The Big Easy is more than Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. It is more than the million or so souls displaced by the flood. New Orleans is the port through which nearly 75% of the nation’s farm exports flow out to the world’s economy. New Orleans and the Delta is where most of the oil production from the offshore rigs comes to be refined into gasoline and heating oil. It is the site of major refineries upon which the nation has come to rely for a good bit of its fuel. Damage to the refineries and pipelines is not the major problem caused by the storm. It is the devastation to the electrical generation and distribution system that will take months – if not years - to restore that will cause increasing economic pain for America.

The pictures of human tragedy that stream from the television set are wrenching but the effect of the damage and floods that we see is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the damage, most of the dislocation lies unseen below the surface. The President vowed yesterday that we will re-build New Orleans. We will and all of us will pay the price. The question is whether we can afford to do it while we simultaneously destroy and rebuild Iraq?