Was It a Good Trade?

This is what I've been thinking about.

Our President has repeatedly failed to be fully truthful to us. He misled us
about Iraq, both in terms of the WMD's and the nuclear
threat. There is no evidence of biological weapons,
there is no evidence that Saddam was anywhere near
being able to put a nuke together even if he had been
able to get ahold of the uranium, BUT there's oil.
Our President is a capitalist. His friends are
capitalists. And therein lies the root of so many of
his decisions.

And, Katrina? Let alone Wilma and Rita?

Blame someone else. Coverup. Prevaricate.

He and his co-horts continue to skirt around the federal
government's failure to respond, and failure to take
responsibility for what happened to New Orleans and
the whole Gulf Coast. Particularly New Orleans. They
were so reluctant to spend the $14 or so million to
strengthen the levees (whatever it was, it was a
modest amount) to protect the City. They failed NOLA
- Katrina itself did little damage to the City. The
failure of the levees was caused by mismanagement and
fiscal irresponsibility and short-sightedness and just
plain dickheadedness, all of which led to the flooding
problems, homelessness and needless deaths.

And that $14 million or so that could have been used
to strengthen the levees and possibly prevent the flooding, has
increased exponentially to the gazillions of $ the
experts now say it will take to rebuild the City and
the Gulf Coast.

So, my question is, what did they spend that $14
million on? That $14 million that would have saved the
levees and the City? What was the trade-off? Did
they get their money's worth by trading $14 mil for
gazillions?????? What was SO important that the feds
couldn't spend a truly modest amount in Louisiana, to fix something they
were responsible for and knew could eventually fail?
Did they get a fair trade? The safety of New Orleans
and its citizens was traded for......what?

I WANT TO KNOW! What was the upgrade of the NOLA
levee system TRADED FOR?