OPINION:
I haven’t heard anyone ask whether the U.S. has the inventory to supply the thousands of businesses, schools and houses burned down by the recent California wildfires with the materials needed for rebuilding. However, I have a couple of solutions.
What about the billions of tons of lumber sitting in fields from Hurricane Helene? Just down the street from my house are piles of wood that are three or more stories high and taking up an area larger than a football field. Surely there are many other piles just like this throughout the south that could be given to California and other states that need to rebuild. (The downside is that we likely don’t have enough lumber mills to turn all the debris into building material.)
Here’s another money-saving idea for the government: Federal land is the people’s land, so we should be drilling more for oil on it. We could use the revenue from the sale of that oil to pay down our massive national debt. Perhaps we could do the same thing with shuttered steel mills.
Finally, what about having a foreign-aid lottery once a year, with the only permitted applicants U.S. allies and those nations that uphold our values? We could give the winners a certain number of U.S. tax dollars, and then they’d then have to wait until all the other countries won before applying again. No more giving billions to countries that hate us.
GREGORY J. TOPLIFF
Aiken, South Carolina
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