DeSantis Declares Emergency Over Floods After Cutting Stormwater Funds
"As I'm sitting here stuck on a Brightline train because of flooding in my district, all those stormwater projects he cut look pretty stupid right now," a Florida lawmaker said.
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He knows democrats will bail him out because they do the right thing. Insurance agencies won't, though. The writing is on the wall when your insurance premiums skyrocket. Or worse, they drop you.
How many insurance companies are actually left in Florida? I thought a good percentage of them have pulled out of the state entirely citing climate change. I know the premiums offered by the remaining companies have to be insane and it's not going to get any better.
Massive flooding of whole cities is simply not an insurable thing. Not even with all the reinsurers in the world can you pay out a city of millions. Most sane countries don't even try.
I live about 5m under sea level. Should de dikes breach and my polder flood (and I don't die horribly), the insurance company pays fuck all. The Dutch state has a giant mountain of cash sitting by for cases like that.
Of course, handing DeSantis a giant pile of emergency cash would just mean it instantly gets turned into bribes, so that wouldn't work for Florida.
Fun fact, the biggest point in Florida is currently 345 feet above sealevel. (it’s somewhere near the ballsack.)
The average is like 100
It’s a very bad state to ignore climate change in.
(Edit fixed the stats.)
Coincidentally, I posted this in Political Memes yesterday-
Mar-A-Lago will become the first course exclusively comprised of 18 holes of water hazards.
And the fraud was off the charts too. Roofers going door to door offering free roofs: “oh we can put in a claim…”
My insurance is dropping me because I had the audacity to try to use it. We had one claim that paid for some damage after a flood, one to pay for a water heater, and that's it. They decided that means we will probably ask again the next time something goes wrong, so why would they want to keep insuring us?
Insurance is a scam, and it pisses me off that we're still tolerating their bullshit.
The concept is good. But the way it is run right now is just taking money and fight tooth and nail to pay as less as they can gey away with it.
I would argue that the concept is flawed. The base idea is that you calculate statistics on how much you would be likely to have to pay out, then set premiums such that you'll always be ahead of payouts. Essentially, everyone pays so that the unfortunate few who need help can get money out of the common pool to help.
This is just taxes, basically. We already do this with fire departments and such. However, insurance adds a profit motive on top because it's a company, so the amount they take in must always be significantly higher than the amount they pay out. And if it's a publicly traded company then the amount they make above and beyond the amount they pay out must always be higher every quarter.
Like at a certain point, why not just do taxes and better disaster relief? As an added bonus, the government would have an extra incentive to care about things that may make the payouts increase, like poor infrastructure or climate change.
Many people are ideologically opposed to taxes and cooperation.
Reminds me of when right-wingers accidentally reinvent like buses or socialized health care under a different name.
In short, people are emotion driven and many of them are stupid on top of that.
Taxes and disaster relief is a form of insurance, I agree with you there. When I say the concept is good, I mean people pooling a little bit in a big fund and then if something happens, the money is taken from the fund.
Insurance companies in the current system will nickel and dime you and deny your claims.
We already do this to an extent. It's called FEMA.
I am not against the government growing it's role in this sector, I just would be concerned about the perverse incentives and subsidizing the very wealthy. Why should I have to pay for your nice house on the river that exceeds 8x or more my annual gross income? You couldn't get private insurance because everyone knew this was a really bad place for a McMansion so you went to the government and got a free lunch. Also you are pretty much asking renters, who are usually poorer, to give money to homeowners who are usually richer.
Maybe if it was structured more like FDIC. The government provides insurance but there is a cap on how much. If you want more go to the free market.
I was mostly focused on how irritating it is that there's yet another way that basic necessities are monetized, rather than on the actual implementation details.
The government already tracks average home and property values for determining property tax and also for determining what is a reasonable mortgage for a given area. I was kind of thinking that it would just be in addition to property tax so based on your home value, so those with very large houses would already be paying proportionally more into it.
If it weren’t a way to extract profit and the money stayed in a fund. It would secure society, Almost like social security. Just stop building in flood zones ffs.
Just stop building in flood zones ffs.
I don't want to live in the desert or badlands. Plus I thought we were trying to encourage people to move to cities so they wouldn't have to drive as much.
I've had friends get fucked in the ass by their insurance company that refused to let them buy flood insurance even though they weren't particularly close to a body of water. When the "once in 500 years" (not) flood came, their house that they had owned for years was destroyed. Insurance that they paid for picked up none of their $100,000 damages.
They rebuilt it out of pocket and are selling it and moving to a place that is more ecologically stable. Fuck insurance companies.
I mean…. It sounds like the insurance company knew it was going to flood. Being close to a body of water has nothing to do with likelihood to flood…
Seems like your friends should have moved before the flood, if they couldn’t get insurance for it. Why were they even searching for flood insurance if “they weren’t particularly close to a body of water”?
Sorry but this definitely sounds like your friends’ fault. They knew they needed the insurance because it would flood, the insurance company knew with high certainty it was going to flood, and then it did flood.
Same boat. I can't get flood insurance. All I can do is really hurt my life by moving or just accept that one day I am going to lose a lot of my stuff. I have accepted the latter.