AN ILL WIND BLOWS IN THE OPPORTUNITY SOCIETY (via Mike Daley):

Open for Business: We’ve had a disaster, but now we have an opportunity. (Congressman Bobby Jindal, 2/28/06, National Review)

As we rebuild, it is crucial we commit to improving our education systems and health-care infrastructure. We need to foster community-based schools that connect needed resources to help young people successfully learn, stay in school, and prepare for life, and we need to provide financial and regulatory relief to health-care providers. We also need to ensure that Louisianans have access to personalized health-care services. This should include efforts to make private insurance more affordable. Refundable tax credits, new insurance products — including health-reimbursement arrangements, health savings accounts, state-run purchasing pools, and regulatory relief — must be provided to make it easier for individuals to purchase private coverage.

One of the quickest and most affordable ways of increasing access to high quality affordable care is to provide families with jobs that provide employer-sponsored health-care benefits. To this end, we need to push for more workforce training, aggressive tax relief, including suspension of capital gains and incomes taxes, regulatory relief — all and all, more economic freedom in the Gulf coast to spur investment in the future.

Before Congress wrapped up last year, we passed legislation that created the "Gulf Opportunity Zone," a set of business tax incentives — such as bonus depreciation for equipment purchases, increased expensing for small businesses, and net-operating-loss carryback for new repairs and investment, which allows companies to "carry back" current losses to earlier, profitable years and obtain tax refunds. These economic incentives will help create the impetus for businesses to stand on solid ground while attracting new investment to the region.

MORE (via mc):
Gulf Coast's home boom (Ron Scherer, 2/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

All this is happening even before the US Congress tackles a major funding bill that could give up to $150,000 each to the owners of more than 167,000 homes that were destroyed. All this is also ahead of the Federal Emergency Management Agency issuing new flood-plain maps, expected at the end of next month.

Most of these home- building efforts are individual, as people either receive insurance checks or dip into savings. But six months after the hurricane, the need is still so great that large developers, such as KB Homes, have announced they will build major new subdivisions.