A Real Counterfactual

All too often, when we talk about government investment in things that keep people safe — public health measures, fire safety, what-have-you — there's no counterfactual to show what would have happened if the investment hadn't been made.

There's no way to count the people who didn't die or get seriously injured or sick. So the (too many) people in this country with no imagination or no empathy are unwilling to spend money to prevent disasters. The covid pandemic made it worse, as the MAGA crowd grabbed it as a political issue. (See the recent If Books Could Kill episode on the book In COVID's Wake, part 2, for discussion of this.)

Anyway — the recent flooding and mass death event in Kerr County, Texas, has provided an inadvertent counterfactual. Its county leaders went out of their way to not spend money they had immediately available to create a warning system for a river they knew had a history of flash floods that had killed people in the past.

Check out this post from emptywheel's blog that provides transcripts from their meetings, where they discussed it at various points since the mind 20-teens. While some members try to argue for a warning system, what became the majority doesn't want to have sirens that interrupt their sleep or that could help undeserving tourists in their area (since the "real" residents would know how to get out and don't need help, of course). And then post-covid, they don't want to accept tainted federal money from the communist Biden administration. Really.

In response to all this, Buffalo News editorial cartoonist Adam Zyglis created this cartoon:



And wouldn't you know it, folks in Buffalo just had to cancel an event where Zyglis was to appear because there were death threats against him. You know, since he dared to make a cartoon that named the problem.

Since the mass deaths and overall destruction from the flooding, there has been news that Kristi Noem defunded FEMA's response phone lines on the second day after the flooding.

Cara Jackson posted this to BlueSky:

Two days after deadly Texas floods, the agency struggled to answer calls from survivors because of call center contracts that weren’t extended. This is so horrifying I made a bar graph:

Laura Kowalski Linden @samoart.bsky.social said this:

Further context: If you’ve never dealt with FEMA after a disaster I can tell you they answer within 30 seconds. No hold times. Real live wonderful people who help while you cry and can’t even figure out what questions to ask. They walk you through it all. Every call. NOEM STOLE THAT $ FOR ICE.

Which is an interesting point. Before the budget reconciliation bill was passed in Congress, ICE was exceeding its already large budget, so Noem has been moving money around within DHS funds to give more of it to ICE. Kowalski Linden's claim could well be correct.