Lifeboats in Katrina

The German magazine Der Spiegel provides an inept analysis of American economics and politics in today's hack job on Hurricane Katrina. The article starts off with a twisted take on poverty statistics: America is not only licking its wounds, but also confronting underlying race problems revealed by the floodwaters. Just how racially imbalanced is the world's richest country? Poverty under the Bush administration has climbed by 12 percent. ... On the same day the levees broke, Charles Nelson of the US Census Bureau in Washington presented the most recent report on income and poverty in the United States. The numbers and graphs he unveiled offered an appalling insight into the USA.

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However, our current poverty rate beats all but the final two years of the Clinton administration, which saw the population grow by 22 million over eight years. Bush has had a population growth of 12 million in four years. Again, it hardly seems likely that the increase represents the rich flocking to our shores. Does Der Spiegel tell anyone that? No, of course not. It's all about hating Bush. Frank Hornig then turns this contextless stat into an indictment of the effects slavery has on Louisiana, noting wide disparities between the economic status of the poor and the rich. Louisiana does have a high poverty rate, but Hornig fails to note that it has improved over the past three years. He also quotes Frank Rich's contention that New Orleans had "Titanic syndrome ... Only the first-class people had access to the lifeboats." Hornig should ask Mayor Ray Nagin about why he didn't get the lifeboats, in the form of buses, rolling as the city emergency operation plan demanded prior to the hurricane's landfall. It didn't have anything to do with poverty, except perhaps for poverty of thought and preparation.