A States Rights argument against Federal Aid for Fulton County

Now that the flood waters have lowered a bit, I wanted to take a few minutes on this quiet Sunday evening to make the case that Fulton County NOT get aid from the federal government.

While I understand that many are suffering because of recent events, and they certainly should be helped, it is my personal belief that only the State of Georgia, along with any private charities, should be responsible for helping them through this crisis.

The whole point of a monetary system is to assign value to certain items, places, people, services. The whole point is the correct distribution of assets. It should not surprise anyone that there are certain parts of the country where you would not be flooded even if it did rain like that and it probably wouldn't anyways - my childhood home of Seattle, WA immediately comes to mind. In the Seattle Area, there are very strict regulations that prohibit you from building on flood plains. As a result, only a handful of communities built before these regulations were in effect ever get flooded to begin with. What's even better, the floodprone areas are reserved for farming, keeping local agriculture close to the city center and allowing for easy expansion of railways and classification yards if made necessary by industrial growth.

In addition, as Fargo, North Dakota demonstrated earlier this year, the elbow grease and hardwork of the townspeople, or local government, can be a far more powerful protector and rebuilder then anything that dispassionoate, hardhearted FEMA could ever muster. They saved their town completely, the floodwaters never breached their sandbags.

If Georgia is not willing to regulate its' building, it should either pay the cost of repair work and humanitarian aid like a gentleman, pursue the grace of voluntary donors, or improve the land to handle future flooding, while also picking up its' current bill. Preferably, it should do all three.

When states pay for their own disasters, the natural disadvantages of living in that state are fairly, justly, and correctly measured against the citizens, driving out business to safer states and places, and making states responsible for their own maintenance. What's even better, as states are more responsible for their own maintenance, federal government will have both less mandate and less ability to interfere in their governance. States Rights and States Responsibilities go hand and hand.

Our Friend Chambliss

Honestly folks, I really did not know what to write about today.

I was supposed to give you this Fulton County update, and I hadn't really heard about anything happening in this sleepy corner of Cosmopolitan America, even looked a little, so I decided to visit the webpage of my favorite Senator, Saxby Chambliss. His headline in the upper left of the site didn't link to anything, and on his biography page, 8 of the 9 paragraphs were dedicated to the last 16 years of his life, and his quick rise to power as a Senator. Many awards were listed, but few specific bills or accomplishments. A lot was told about him supporting this or that constituency or local interest, but very little was told about his actual philosophy or passion. He apparently was a lawyer before that representing farmers in South Georgia, and still lives in the South Georgia town of Moultrie. He supported the farm bill, and received a "Golden Plow" from the American Farm Beareau Federation. That farm bill along with the ethanol subsidies has caused more hardship among the poor in my neck of the woods then you could possibly believe or understand, for it drives up, beyond market levels, the cost of that most basic of neccesities, food.

Speaking of Ethanol, he introduced (and told us about in a seperate section called "Accomplishments") a short, sweet, easy to read bill called the Celluloise Ethanol Incentive Act of 2007, which proposes increasing the percentage of ethanol in gas tanks to 11% by 2013, despite the fact that most cars can only handle 10% ethanol, and forcing all geographical regions to use at least 30% ethanol from THAT region, making the subsidies even more burdensome and inefficient, especially in places like California & NYC where land is expensive.

He also supported earmark transperancy, despite himself working for many earmarks, including a 74 million dollar "goverment investment" ethanol plant in Truentlen county. More importantly, though, his attitude is the kind that causes earmarks in the first place, the attitude of stealing from one state to give to another, whether by tariffs and subsidies or programs funded by national tax dollars. My source, as usual, is his own website.

Is Saxby an exceptionally bad senator? No. He's probably even slightly better then most. But he doesn't really stand for anything, or if he does, he's sure not making it public knowledge. Unfortunately, that describes a lot of senators and politicians. It would be nice to elect someone who actually represents something one of these days, rather then just being constantly afraid for their office. It would be nice to find that rare person, like a Sarah Palin, a Ronald Reagan, or even a George W. Bush or LBJ with real fire running through their veins and a vision for the future, someone who really cares about this country and its' future.

The only things I like about Saxby is he's a Republican and he supports the F-22, a versatile, stealthy, well-armed, maneuverable fighter juggernaut that was unjustly canceled by the Obama Administration that would be built in Fulton County. Also, as far as we can tell he has yet to screw anything up or run off to Argentina with any Maria's.

Obamanomics and Georgia

by George Dienhart

Obamanomics at work. We're lucky here in Georgia, when compared to states like Michigan. Georgia’s unemployment rate rose to 10.3 percent in July, up two-tenths of a percentage point from last month. Yeah, that qualifies as lucky these days. If we were stuck in Michigan, we'd be at about 15%.

July’s total was 493,748, which was an increase of 63.6 percent from July of 2008. 163,839, or 33.2 percent, received state unemployment insurance benefits, while approximately 140,000 received federally funded extended benefits. The number of payroll jobs in July decreased 199,400 from July 2008. The manufacturing, trade, transportation and warehousing, professional and business services sectors were hit especially hard. Health care and private educational services showed a combined increase of 10,400 jobs, while local and state governmental education grew by 9,200 jobs.


Just some food for thought- we know that the federal government is growing out of control. Why did the state government add over 9000 jobs? Seems like bad timing to me...

Please welcome Alberto Dominguez

Alberto will cover statewide and national issues for APO. Welcome!