Such a deal!

In a perfect example of how easy it is to waste other people’s money, FEMA sold off brand-new, perfectly good emergency trailers for a small fraction of the price the government paid:

Federal officials sold hundreds of emergency trailers for disaster victims at fire-sale prices in the months before Hurricane Sandy churned toward the United States, The Washington Examiner has learned.

Now, with thousands of families left homeless in New York and New Jersey by the hurricane, those same federal officials are poised to spend more taxpayer dollars to buy brand-new trailers.

And such a deal they were too!

The trailers were sold for a fraction of the original $25,000 price the government paid for each of them. The General Services Administration, which handled the auctions for FEMA, sold some for as little as $3,800.

I could have used an extra back-up house. Why wasn’t I notified? I mean, these “temporary” houses are bigger and more complete than many houses that people live in:

The trailers are similar to single-wide mobile homes and feature one to three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bath. They are supposed to provide durable housing for disaster victims while their homes are being rebuilt. FEMA offers the homes to eligible residents for up to 18 months.

That this was done not long before Hurricane Sandy ought to piss people off, but apparently not enough of them cared enough to vote.

Now that this has hit the press, meetings will probably be held at FEMA, and a new plan will be implemented to address the temporary housing shortage by buying more trailers! And then they can sell them off for a fraction of their value and so on.

No private company would get away with such antics, because it would soon be bankrupt. Unsound companies die a natural death, as they should, and other companies take their place.

The government cannot spend itself to death because it has an unlimited supply of fiat currency, backed up ultimately by the taxpayers.

The taxpaying productive classes, of course, can be spent to death, especially once they are in the minority of voters.

If there is a moral lesson here, it is to avoid productivity at all costs!


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2 responses to “Such a deal!”

  1. Daniel Taylor Avatar
    Daniel Taylor

    They have to go to auction if they can’t keep them, and auctions go that way. If they’d kept them and Sandy hadn’t come in they would be wasting our money on storage.

    There isn’t news here, just another example of planning not always being able to keep up with events.

  2. Kathy Kinsley Avatar
    Kathy Kinsley

    Indeed, you are correct – in one respect. BUT, they could have waited until the end of this hurricane season? Considering the number of misses – and number of named storms, *I* would have waited. FEMA is obviously wiser than I am /sarcasm off.