Rebuilding After Katrina

Natural disasters are not unusual in the United States. In any location a wide variety of natural disasters can ocur and as is the way in this great nation, the taxpayers will step up to the plate to provide immediate relief to those in need and to provide long term recovery options to rebuild after the disaster is over.

I have no problem with that. However, once a person or business takes federal funds to rebuild, if they rebuild in the same location, they should never again be eligable for federal relief for the same kind of disaster.

I say this because now they know that they live in an area subject to fires or floods or tornados or hurricanes or earthquakes. if they rebuild in the same location they do so knowing and accepting the risks. As far as relief goes, once they have been through such a situation, they should be prepared with the supplies and equipment necessary to survive without aid and they should have a plan as to where to go and how to get there. If they don't, why should I and other tax payers, who work hard for our money, have to pay for their stupidity.

A much better solution is to provide relief and money to rebuild with strings attached. Those strings would require that any new structure erected in place of a destroyed structure (or repairs to a damaged structure) must be such as to assure the new or rebuilt structure will survive under a similar disaster in the future.

In the case of homes and businesses located in a flood plain or in an area such as New Orleans which is below the surrounding water level, no new building could be built with federal funds that is not above the flood level. No building could be repaired unless it is first raised above the flood level.

This could be accomplished by bringing in fill dirt and raising the ground level or by building the new structure up on some sort of base (legs, stilts whatever) capable of withstanding 200 mile per hour winds and 100 year floods.

Recipients would be required to show that the new home or business is equipped to allow survival without assistance for the maximum number of people the facility is designed for for at least one week. Water, food, first aid and power would all be required and would be subject to inspection. If found wanting for any of these, the person owning the structure would be required to repay all funds recieved with interest calculated to reflect what a commercial loan would have cost.

Expensive? Yes, but cheaper than rebuilding a city like New Orleans every decade or so.

Pay For Public School Teachers

I am not a big fan of the public education system. As a young kid who was eager to learn I was subjected to the Everett, WA public school system. The Everett school system used what was known in the education industry as the "Boreing Method of Teaching."

They completely drove any interest in doing well (in school) out of me. I never lost my love of learning but even in grade and high school I was pretty much on my own. The number of teachers I had who were competent and who stick out in my mind to this day can be numbered on one finger!

A big part of the problem is a complete lack of accountability. It would be easy (as usual I have a simple solution, but who listens to me) to instill accountability. All we would have to do is tie a teachers pay to how their students do in the future.

Grade school teachers would start out their career earning a minimum wage. They would get cost of living increases for the next few years until their students get into high school. At that point the grade school teachers pay would be tied to how well their students do in high school, and later to how well they do in college and in the working world.

The same process would apply to high school teachers. Their pay would eventually be tied to how well their student do in college and by how much their students, who don't go on to college, earn in their jobs.

College professors would simply get paid the average of what their students earn after graduation. The more students they have who do well in their careers, the better the college professors pay. In fact once students have graduated and begun their careers, the average of their pay could be factored all the way back to the grade school teachers. Although it may require developing suitable programs for calculating teachers pay, the info could be tracked by following income tax returns.

In the hopeful eventuality of the demise of our current tax system and its replacement with the Lender/Boortz Fair Tax Plan, then a system by which students would report back voluntarily throughout their lives could be implemented. Then, not only would teachers need to be competent, they would also have to be likeable to insure their students would want to take care of them in their old age!

ENGLISH FOR THE WORLD

I am a strong believer in a one world government. The United States of America. I think the world would be a better place if it were run by the good old US of A. While it is likely that the radical left wing in the United States would be overjoyed to see a socialist one world government, they would howl with outrage at the mere thought that a one world government might be a representative republic based on the rule of law.
There is a way to strongly increase the influence of the United States in the world and that is to assure that the English language becomes the dominant language in the world. A universal language. A long time ago a universal language was developed called Esperanto. It was a language constructed to have consistent rules of grammar and consistent phonetic spelling. It is a very simple language to learn but it never really caught on.
While languages have come and gone in popularity as "international languages" English has become a defacto international language in some fields such as aviation, business and science. A few decades or a century or two from now than may not be the case. For example, French (!) Could come into ascendancy again. French for Gods sake!
There is a way to push English to the point of being a defacto, if not official, world language and thus providing those of us who are native English speakers an advantage in the world. The way to do this is to follow the lead of the Esperantists (yes they are still out there, try to convince anyone who will listen to learn to speak Esperanto).
First of all the language can be simplified to a basic vocabulary of no more than 1,000 words. Of course once a person learns to speak this new International English (IE) picking up a larger vocabulary will be easy.
Second, the rules of grammar need to be made consistent and reduced to a minimum number of rules. Why should any language have irregular verbs. In American English a verb such as "to be" conjugates as I am, you are, he is, we are, you all are, they are. In IE "to be" would conjugate as I be, you be, he be, we be, you all be, they be. I know it sounds bad but you know what? you know what it means when you hear it or read it. In American English we can use pronouns to good advantage to simplify all verbs, not just irregular verbs. An example would be the verb "to go". In American English the third person singular would be "he goes". In IE the verb would be "he go."
Third, spelling must be rationalized so that al words are spelled the way they sound and sound the way they are spelled. No more silent letters. No more unusual pronunciations.
Considering the big lead English already has towards becoming an international language, such a simplification would make it certain to become the official language of the world community and although it would not sound exactly the same, it would be no more difficult to communicate with a speaker of IE than it is to communicate with an Englishman.