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Just one day before his WNYC interview, 9/11 Victims' Compensation Fund master Kenneth Feinberg published a must-read opinion piece in the Star-Ledger, arguing, among other things, that:

>the victims of future terror attacks probably should not be compensated by the federal government

>if compensation is given after future terror attacks, it should be a flat rate for every victim, not calibrated to projected future earnings

>9/11 was a truly exceptional circumstance, different even from the 1998 Africa bombings and the Oklahoma City bombing, and the government's response should not serve as a precedent

Your thoughts:

As a person who filed a claim for my brother who lost his wife, I found the program very disturbing. It was run well, but it paid my brother, a banker, a lot of money that he did not need. There are a lot of people and businesses that actually do need help.
-Anonymous in Queens

The richness of our country is incredible. Just this morning the big news is that the US, and other rich nations, are forgiving something like 40 billion dollars of African debt. And we are talking about distributing 7 billion dollars in payments to the victims of 9/11. Those families deserve ALL the generosity of the American public but the juxtaposition of the two amounts this morning stopped me in my tracks.
-SG

Did I hear that someone actually got $500 for a broken finger? I mean seriously, who claims that kind of injury? Isn't that kind of opportunistic?
And that leads me to my question, were there many of these types of claims and was the whole compensation effort one big feeding frenzy?
-AA