Haley Stevens: “let me make sure that everybody understands what we are voting on. The Senator from Texas complains-- and I think…”

“let me make sure that everybody understands what we are voting on. The Senator from Texas complains-- and I think rightly--that we are spending really a great deal of money on disasters. They grow every year, and it is because the moneys that we have allocated to disasters under authorization laws and under regulations have increased. I tell the Senator that the money available during the period right after the great earthquake in Alaska in 1964 compared to the amount of money that was available to those people who were harmed by the California earthquake--the California program for recovery--was much more heavily financed, and necessarily so. New concepts of assistance have grown since that time. If the Senator wants to examine and ask the Congress to examine and put limits on what we spend after a disaster, this Senator would be pleased to work with him on it. If the Senator wants to say that we ought to predict how much money we are going to have available for disasters and put a cap on that, this Senator would never agree with that. If the great Madrid Fault down by Tennessee ever slips again, as it did in the middle of the last century, to the extent that the bells in Boston rang when that earthquake took place in the middle of our continent, if that would happen today, the cost of that disaster would be just overwhelming. There is no way to predict how much money we are going to spend on disasters.”