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Tuesday Talk: How prepared is your community?
No public policy could prevent last week’s Duluth flooding. However, smart investments in public services and local emergency response systems mitigated flooding’s public safety threat. Conservatives are the first to criticize local governments in the absence of an adequate response yet they advocate policy that reduces such services—fewer police, firefighters, and EMS. This jeopardizes safety.
Current law calls for more local government budget cuts.
With another generation of conservative public policy, will Minnesota be prepared for future floods, tornadoes, and blizzards?
Comments:
June 26, 2012 at 9:39 am
Leave it to this web site to politicize a tragedy of this proportion. Communities pull together in times of emergency. They do not need your divisive rhetoric?
June 26, 2012 at 8:25 am
In a word, NO. We are not prepared, and never will be, if the Conservatives continue to push their austerity program.
In addition, those who don’t believe in climate change, refuse to make changes. As a result, we will continue to have more extreme weather incidents (floods, tornados, droughts, hurricanes, blizzards, etc.) We need to elect people now who believe in science and who are willing to raise taxes to make changes, if it isn’t already too late.
Bernice Vetsch says:
June 26, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Some four decades ago, a 12-year-old boy who had volunteered for the Nixon campaign when he was 11 had the brainstorm of a lifetime. If every Republican refused to raise taxes no matter what, our bloated government would shrink and America would prosper as a result.
His name was Grover Norquist, and he has worked to achieve that dream every day since—as has the right wing of the Republican Party no matter how high a chronological age they reach. Its utter failure as public policy has been apparent for decades, but that doesn’t seem to stop today’s ultra-conservatives here and in the IMF from continuing to believe that the way to grow an economy is to shrink it.
Our cities and towns have so far met the challenge of annual reductions in state “aid” (which is actually OUR money remitted to the state in the form of income and property taxes). I do believe a time will come when big events will cost more than any city can afford and that the Right, if still in power, will chide us for not setting aside enough to cover.