Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Andrew Sullivan takes note of an LATimes story:

BUSH VERSUS CONSERVATISM: In general, it's a good idea for the administration not to expand existing entitlements for Katrina victims and to rely on once-only measures. In so far as they are doing that, good for them. Once you create an entitlement, it lives for ever. But this strikes me as bizarre:

Instead of offering $10,000 [rental housing] vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

We have a unique chance to fight poverty by dispersing some of New Orleans' underclass across the country in places with empty rental markets. Instead, the Bush administration is creating trailer-ghettoes that cost more. Newt Gingrich is right to be livid. Isn't this a no-brainer?

For once I agree with Gingrich, who is quoted in the story saying "The idea that — in a community where we could place people in the private housing market to reintegrate them into society — we would put them in [trailer] ghettos with no jobs, no community, no future, strikes me as extraordinarily bad public policy, and violates every conservative principle that I'm aware of."

I also object to the obvious poison pill in this aid: the main thing offering subsidized trailer housing in New Orleans does is to provide these poor people a particularly efficient opportunity to lose everything all over again. It would be cynical and churlish of me to infer that FEMA intends to offer less aid for more money. As Napoleon reputedly said, "Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."