Why’s it okay to expect help from the Feds if there’s a flood, but not if you get diagnosed with cancer? Shouldn’t a truly responsible citizenry have fended for itself, and built better dams, or not lived somewhere prone to the occasional deluge to begin with? Or at the very least, purchased private flood insurance en masse? Isn’t that what a responsible governor would’ve had us do?
Aren’t you just taking the public option for flood insurance? Just wonderin’.
PROVIDENCE — Governor Carcieri made a formal request Thursday asking President Obama to declare a “major disaster” for four counties in Rhode Island that were hardest hit during the severe storms that caused the Pawtuxet River to flood last week.
Tea Party-types in low-lying Cranston / Warwick, repeat after me:
“Climate change is a lie. Climate change is a lie. Climate change is a lie.”
Repeat until submerged.
This is one of those things where the more you know, the more you think: WTF?!?
Arthur glibly refers to “private flood insurance” as if there were such a thing. In most flood impact areas, the federal insurance is the only option. In one of those bizarre local-interest things, Narragansett Bay Insurance Co. (formerly Pawt. Mutual Fire Ins.) is stepping in with a private option in this region, but they can’t help all those people who lost their private coverage post-Katrina. George Soros was a big investor in this group.
Both these local floods and the insurance story have a connection: climate change. Whatever the hell you think about this topic, the following is a stone, cold fact – insurance companies are freaked the hell out!
Knowledgeable people talk about ‘atmosphere acceleration’ as an immediate and powerful outcome. In plain talk, the weather is still the weather, only somebody turned the volume up. A lot.
Anticipate more and more of this, in fact, annually. The number of high-impact weather events will increase. Rain storms will be bigger, wetter with lower lows at their center.
But, lastly, I just wanted to make the obvious connection between insurance and socialism. The basic idea of insurance is to spread risk among a wide group so that when tragedy befalls one, the broader group picks up the slack. This creates a range of benefits, including a more stable economy / society.
In all cases, the best way to reduce risk is to spread it across the largest group you can pull together. In terms of flood insurance (or any other kind of insurance), the largest possible group is all of us. Why there would be anything but a single-payer insurance of any kind is beyond me.
Or maybe it’s not. I’ve described the best way to minimize risk, not the best way to make a profit.
Why don’t perfectly reasonable arguments like this make it through the filter of the “Liberal Media”? I’m so tired of a-holes getting airtime with comparisons to Hitler and the Soviet Union. Why do dumb people get any play at all. Arthur, please run for Governor. Thank you.
Right on Arthur!