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As a president, U.S. Grant generally gets a bad press, but he had interesting ideas. Troubled by the corrupt Santa Fe Ring, the expense of protecting settlers from the Apache and the lack of mineral bonanzas, Grant suggested that the United States start another war to the south, to force Mexico to take New Mexico back.
He would have done better to find a new home for Florida, which is too expensive for the United States.
The East Coast blizzard last week will cost us billions in disaster relief and increased insurance premiums. But we'll pay more for Florida, because it has delicate citrus crops, too.
Hurricane Andrew was just one of many -- Florida sits
smack in the usual path of nature's fury -- and it will
cost at least $7.3 billion, much of it from the federal
treasury because George Bush, desperate for 25 Florida
electoral votes last fall, made promises that would be
called bribes
if you or I made such offers.
Why should we keep paying and paying these outrageous subsidies to encourage people to live there? It's as if someone persisted in putting his thumb under a hammer, and then sent you a bill for treatment. And as soon as he gets home, he puts his thumb right back under the hammer. People have every right to be stupid, but where is the public obligation to subsidize continued habitation of a hurricane corridor?
Or of a paradise for vermin. Nancy Vickery, a friend who
lived there in the 1950s, said it was bad enough then with
voracious mosquitoes and hungry alligators. On a recent
visit, she encountered the new flying cockroaches.
Normal roaches scatter when you turn on the light, but
these are attracted to light. They're like your worst
nightmare come to life.
Florida is vulnerable to the calamities of nature, and it's also a military liability. Every recent major invasion -- Cubans, Haitians, cocaine -- of American soil has come through Florida, the soft underbelly of the United States.
Fortifying the 580 miles of Florida coastline would be much more expensive than merely keeping porkbarrel Homestead AFB open, and what's worth keeping?
Take out Florida -- the place where pro-life
advocates kill people in cold blood, home of Miami with the
highest violent-crime rate in the nation -- and the U.S.
crime rate drops by 4 percent. Not much, perhaps, but it is
more than all the get-tough mandatory sentencing laws have
ever accomplished.
Worried about an aging American population which will demand ever more from the federal government? The average American is 35.5 years old; the average Floridian is 39. Only 12.6 percent of the American population is 65 or older, but in Florida, it's 18.3 percent.
They vote, too. That's why Paul Tsongas, who told the truth about Social Security funding, lost the Florida primary last year to Bill Clinton, who knew that fiscal truth amounts to a death warrant in the Florida political climate. Candidates must make stupid promises there, and if they keep them, we get stupid, expensive policies later.
Perhaps a prosperous America could afford Florida. But times are hard. Constant disaster relief, continued invasions, soaring crime rates, more plunder from the Gray Lobby -- Florida is a luxury we just can't afford any more.
The Civil War established that a state cannot leave the Union of its own volition. But the issue of expulsion remains open, and Florida would be a good place to start. If we can't talk Fidel Castro into taking it over, or Spain or France or England into taking it back, then we should go to war.
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