Quite the opposite of Reagan’s philosophy, Katrina proved that Americans are most afraid when their government is NOT there to help. So I took notice of this White House press release on oil spill claims in the SBA disaster response system:
* It means we reduced the average processing time for disaster loans from over 70 days to just 10 days.
* It means we created a way for disaster victims to apply online for loans, and now 30% of applicants choose to use this method.
* It means we dramatically increased the capacity of our disaster loan processing centers (from 366 to 1,750 workstations) and our disaster credit management system (from 800 up to 10,000 users at the same time).
* It means we increased the number of SBA disaster staff from 800 to 1,200. Additionally, we have more than 1,500 active reserve and 500 ready reserve on call when needed. And, it’s important to note that in our last annual survey, 83 percent of the active reservists and 63 percent of the ready reservists said they were available to be deployed with 48 hours notice
Guess we can put this one in the “just like Bush file.”
