Three and a third BILLION dollars to buy 200,000 trailers; that's just one of the line items in the $52 billion pile of pork an overwhelming majority of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate vote to thrown at the Hurricane Katrina disaster this week.

One of Iowa's U.S. Representatives (not mine, I'm sorry to say), Steve King, was one of the dreaded evil eleven "conservative Republicans" to vote against the bloated Katrina aid bill. The no vote was largely symbolic -- of COURSE this aid bill was going to pass -- 99.9% of Washington politicians are more interested in doing the politically expedient thing, not the fiscally responsible thing. But every single one of these eleven Republicans are taking it on the chin -- wrongly -- for their vote against this massive overkill. All these folks were doing is making the case that we need to have more accountability for what's being spent and give a little thought about how we're going to spend it.

There are hundreds of thousands of people displaced and hurting as a result of this horrible natural disaster and no one is saying that we shouldn't be funding FEMA aid for them. But all indications are that this money is just going to be spent for the sake of spending it.

Take the 200,000 trailers for example. Tens of thousands of people -- perhaps better than 100,000 or more -- have already been relocated to spots as far away as Ohio and Iowa and many have no plans to return to the New Orleans area. Yet, if you figure an average of three people per trailer, FEMA plans on buying housing for 600,000 people before they even know how many people are actually going to need it or even where it's going to go. I heard one defender of this plan today say they've just got to find some large area of land outside of New Orleans to put these trailers. Pretty damn large, I'd say. Has anyone ever seen a trailer park with 500 or so trailers in it? We're talking about that times 40. Even if you put 500 here and 500 there, you're talking about a huge chunk of real estate. At 10 per acre, you're talking 20,000 acres of land. To put this in perspective, it's an area roughly 1/6 the size of the entire city of New Orleans.

I don't think anyone at FEMA has thought about the absurdity of pulling some random number of trailers out of their collective asses and plopping them down right in the middle of a hurricane zone before the hurricane season is even over. Can anyone tell me what happened to the trailers that were already in the area during the hurricane? If 90% of the stick-built homes along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana were flattened, any trailers were probably completely demolished. Sure these are supposed to be temporary housing, but how temporary and what are the plans for permanent housing? It's more than likely the ones that do end up being used will become they largest permanent slum Louisiana has ever seen. Even if they do end up being temporary, what do you do with these "temporary" housing units after they've been set up in trailer parks with water sewer and electric going to them? And again, how do we even know that all these trailers are going to be needed? Answer: We don't. A better solution would be to actually determine how many folks are moving back. If you are sure they are moving back, they'll need PERMENANT housing. Setting up a temporary slum is the type of knee-jerk solution you'd expect the government to waste our money on.

The debit card boondoggle the other day is another prime example of how this money is just going to disappear into thin air with no accountability. People found out they were going to get $2,000 cash and they were just about beating each other to death get that money. These people certainly need assistance, but they don't need two grand in cash thrown at them. Many of them had problems with running their lives responsibly BEFORE Katrina, which is why they ended up in the slums of New Orleans in the first place. The last thing we need is a bunch of folks who aren't known for being able to responsibly budget money loose in the streets with $2,000 in cash. If you want to see how fast $2,000 can be spent on nothing, this is the exact way to do it. Fortunately FEMA figured out what a ridiculous plan this was when they saw people practically killing each other to be the first to get their card and killed the plan.

Jeff Flake, an Arizona representative and another of the eleven to vote against this $52 billion money dump talked to John Gibson on Fox News last night. Flake said he wouldn't have a problem with allocating $10 billion at a time to FEMA and having them come back and justify via line item any additional amounts they thought they needed to spend. This is exactly the way the Katrina disaster relief needed to be handled. Unfortunately, they now have a huge $52 billion money dump that they are going to be spending as quickly as they possibly can on whatever they can without regard to whether it's actually needed. We've seen this happen before in other disasters and it looks like the legacy of throwing money at disasters because "we have to do something!!!" is going to continue.