Brooks describes what Bush is trying to accomplish in rebuilding the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Let's hope we can afford this vision because it's the right one.
Bush must find a way to fund it by cutting the present budget. The Times had it right in a previous editorial. The Congress must give up some of its pork spending in the Transportation bill. Let's get on with it.
"Now the Bush administration is trying to change all that. That means trying to get around the corruption that made the city such a rotten place to do business. The White House is trying to do this by devising programs in which checks and benefits flow directly to recipients, not through local agencies.
That means challenging the reigning assumptions. Right now the White House is fighting with Louisiana over where to house evacuees. The state wants to put temporary trailer parks on faraway military bases, where there are no jobs and where they will live in "abject dependency," as one senior White House official puts it. The Bush folks want to put temporary housing within a mile of the original neighborhoods so people can become self-sufficient as quickly as possible."
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