From the September 4th edition of Press the Meat with Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Mike Tidwell, you’ve written about it as well, and you say that in order to rebuild, there’s going to have to be some serious undertakings in recognition of the environmental realities of what exists in the New Orleans area.

MR. MIKE TIDWELL: Well, the question and the answer is: Why in the world is New Orleans below sea level to begin with? I think the media has sort of accepted it uncritically that this city is below sea level which is why we have this problem. Miami is not below sea level. New York’s not below sea level. It’s below sea level because of the levees. The levees stop the river from flooding and the river’s what built the whole coast of Louisiana through 7,000 years of alluvial soil deposits. And if you stop that flooding, the other second natural phenomena in any delta region in the world is subsidence. That alluvial soil is fine, it compacts, it shrinks. That’s why New Orleans is below sea level. That’s why the whole coast of Louisiana is–the whole land platform is sinking. An area of land the size of Manhattan turns to water in south Louisiana every year even without hurricanes.

You can’t just fix the levees in New Orleans. We now have to have a massive coastal restoration project where we get the water out of the Mississippi River in a controlled fashion toward the Barrier islands, restore the wetlands. If you don’t commit to this plan which is this $14 billion, costs of the Big Dig in Boston, or two weeks of spending Iraq, you shouldn’t fix a single window in New Orleans. You shouldn’t pick up a single piece of debris because to do one without the other is to set the table for another nightmare.

Fourteen billion… fourteen billion… where have I heard that number before? Oh, yes, I remember:

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — In a report released today, Dr. Jeffrey Miron, visiting professor of economics at Harvard University, estimates that replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of taxation and regulation similar to that used for alcoholic beverages would produce combined savings and tax revenues of between $10 billion and $14 billion per year. In response, a group of more than 500 distinguished economists — led by Nobel Prize-winner Dr. Milton Friedman — released an open letter to President Bush and other public officials calling for “an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition,” adding, “We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods.”

Using data from a variety of federal and state government sources, Miron’s paper, “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” concludes:

**Replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures on prohibition enforcement-$2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels.

**Revenue from taxation of marijuana sales would range from $2.4 billion per year if marijuana were taxed like ordinary consumer goods to $6.2 billion if it were taxed like alcohol or tobacco.