[ZLP]

Originally posted by jyl
[Warning, ramble alert]

I, too, have this sinking feeling that that $2,000 will be used up pretty quickly. But I'm thinking less about those who'll squander it, than about how far or not it will go for even those who are careful.

Suppose you're a family of four who is in the Houston Astrodome with no possessions. Let's assume you are very careful with money. As long as you stay in the shelter and the relief effort is providing you with food, second-hand clothes, medical care, etc, there's probably not much need to spend the $2,000. But once you leave the shelter, that $2,000 won't last all that long. Think about how long you could buy groceries, pay rent on a room, pay bus fares, etc for four people on $2,000 - in Houston. A few months, max?

So in the end, the $2,000 won't get your family out of the shelter for long. You'll need a job. If the $2,000 allows you to find a job - pays bus fare to go looking, access to a phone to make and receive calls, buys a set of presentable clothes, then it'll make a big difference. If you don't get a job, then with or without the $2,000 you're going to wind up back at the shelter. (Well, there's always welfare, but that's hardly what we want to happen.)

Basically, it's going to come down to jobs.

I'm sure some of the refugees will find work in the communities where they are being sheltered, especially the ones with skills and work experience. But this is a pretty large number of people we're talking about. For example, there's 60-70K refugees in Arkansas shelters, of which perhaps 15-20K working age males and a similar number of working age females (guessing here). Can Arkansas really absorb 30-40K new workers in a reasonable time?

What can be done?

Just thinking out loud, there will be tons of labor and construction jobs created in rebuilding New Orleans - demolition, cleanup, reconstruction. I'd like to see the recovery effort include employing able-bodied refugees in that rebuilding. Rather than have a mass move of construction workers to the Gulf Coast creating a shortage elsewhere in the country, let's have some of the $50 or $100 billion that is going to be spent on rebuilding the property in the Gulf Coast also be used to get the people of the region back on their feet.

I can see all sorts of rules and regulations that will stand in the way, including union hall rules. We can cut through that red tape. I can also see that able-bodied men with no prior construction experience will need training to do even the more basic jobs. We can do rapid training. I can see that contractors won't want to hire newly trained workers or will worry about their workers' comp rates. We can require some % of local labor, and pass emergency laws controlling rates and liability.

Do you guys agree that the biggest need these refugees are going to have is jobs? What do you think the recovery effort can do to, in effect, help the refugees help themselves? Or do you think the refugees should be on their own in this regard?

Most of them didn't work in the first place so I don't see these scabs of society running to get work.... With 30% of the city under the poverty limit how do you think they got there?