A Failure of Public Policy

I got an email a few days ago from the John Edwards campaign. Tied into Edwards' poverty awareness tour, the Subject line said: "George W. Bush doesn't care about poor people." If this New York Times story on the lives of Katrina evacuees still trying to rebuild is any indication, that statement may be more true than anyone would like to admit.

This story is a sad one. Now, far removed by time from the floods and the destruction in New Orleans of August 2005, some people have still failed to get their feet back under them. There hasn't been a single event in recent history that has put on display the tenuous position occupied by the working poor and even some of the middle class.

This is not to say that all of the evacuees were unable to start over. Some 56,000 people have made the transition from disaster aid and temporary housing, according to the NYT. The plight of those left behind is a case of could do, would do: the ones who haven't made it out might not. They include the elderly and the working poor, who are likely engaged in the same type or scale of employment available to them before the floods.

I'm not so arrogant as to suggest a simple public policy could fix the problem, but it isn't the first time in this country that an economic disaster has struck a large population of people. FDR put an entire nation back to work — it would seem like there must be a solution somewhere for those affected by Katrina, but it feels like nobody bothered to look for one in 2006. Bush had the chance to round up a strong initiative for those affected by the Hurricane and make out of the recovery what he could not make out of the response. The Republican-led Congress could have taken the reigns and solved some problems, but they didn't. Maybe FEMA was running low on bootstraps.

It takes something like Katrina to bring the truth about America's economic realities to the surface. Poverty is often ignored in this country because most people have enough. I would argue that too many people are among the ranks of those that don't have enough, and more ought to be done to bring attention to this issue.