Government Subsidies Encouraged Millions To Move Into Hurricane Ian's Destructive Path

[Muda69]

https://reason.com/2022/09/29/government-subsidies-encouraged-millions-to-move-into-hurricane-ians-destructive-path/

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The extent of the havoc wreaked on Florida by Hurricane Ian—now downgraded to Tropical Storm Ian—is still unclear, but it is apparent that it caused major damage from which Floridians will need ample help recovering. Millions of people are reportedly without power and an untold number of homes have been destroyed after the Category 4 hurricane pummeled Florida's coast for most of yesterday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said that Ian would rank "one of the top five hurricanes to ever hit the Florida peninsula." He has asked President Joe Biden to issue a major disaster declaration for all Florida counties, which would open up access to all sorts of federal assistance programs.

"DeSantis also requested President Biden grant the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) the authority to provide 100% federal cost share for debris removal and emergency protective measures" for the next 60 days, his office said. These moves would shift much of the cost of recovery from the storm to the federal government.

 

This should hopefully be a humbling moment for DeSantis, who has spent ample time not only criticizing the Biden administration (fair!), but also baselessly accused Biden of hating Florida and stiffing the state's storm victims. (It should also make DeSantis think twice about wasting state money on political stunts like tricking migrants into going from Texas to Martha's Vineyard.) DeSantis' tune this week has already been much different, talking about how people need to work together across party lines and how he's thankful to the Biden administration for wanting to help. But knowing DeSantis' penchant to infuse everything with partisan bombast, this kumbaya attitude seems unlikely to outlast Ian's immediate aftermath.

In any event, the situation brings up the question that natural disasters like this always do: Why do governments keep subsidizing houses in hurricane zones?

Sure, some people would live in risky areas no matter what. Some live in these areas already and can't afford to move. But government intervention in the insurance market has helped many more people move to these areas since the 1970s—as this piece by Scott Beyer explains:

Every year, homes get flooded from natural disasters like hurricanes. Afterwards, people suggest that others should not be living in flood-prone areas. Yet that's where homes continue getting built, only to be flooded again – as might be predicted.

One reason why: the federal government incentivizes people to build homes in flood plains by offering subsidized flood insurance.

The National Flood Insurance Program was created in 1968. Before the program, few private companies offered flood insurance – it was considered unprofitable. People chose to not buy flood insurance because it was expensive. But after every natural disaster, the federal government had to bail out homeowners in flood-prone areas. After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the first storm to cause over $1 billion in damages, Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Act.

There were some good rationales for the federal government to enter this industry. Private companies were unwilling to do it. Congress thought they would save money on rebuilding homes by offering insurance. Floods affect many homes at once, so it's not an individualized risk like car accidents or fires.

Even though this program had good intentions, it's been a disaster.

(See this Cambridge University Press paper, as well as these Reason pieces, for more on the history of the National Flood Insurance Program.)

Since the program started, tons more people have moved into flood zones. In Florida, for instance, millions of people in the past 50 years have moved into what became Hurricane Ian's path. And many new homes in risky areas were built to accommodate this. While some of these folks would surely have moved regardless, it seems likely that many would have been turned off if they couldn't get relatively inexpensive flood insurance.

And the federal government isn't the only entity subsidizing flood insurance. In Florida, the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance Corporation recently "reached 1.055 million policies — more than double the number two years ago," reports ClickOrlando. CEO Barry Gilway "said this comes as private insurers continue to drop customers to curb their losses."

Interruption of market forces has made moving into disaster zones less financially risky for individuals but much more costly for taxpayers overall, while also discouraging development in other areas and encouraging people to put or keep themselves in harm's way.

Once again I, the taxpayer, are forced to subsidize and in a way validate the consequences of bad & risky decisions of other individuals.

 

 

[Muda69]

The Ghouls Descend On Florida Only to Be Disappointed: https://spectator.org/the-ghouls-descend-on-florida-only-to-be-disappointed/

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Hurricane Ian was an especially challenging natural phenomenon for hydrological, meteorological, and geographical reasons.

Ian was a Category 4 — almost Category 5 — hurricane. That meant wherever it came ashore, it was going to wreck things. It carried storm surge of more than 12 feet when it made landfall, enough to inundate practically all of Lee County, Florida, where the eyewall met the continental United States.

And it wasn’t supposed to target Lee County, which centers around the mid-sized coastal cities of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. It was supposed to dive into the west coast of Florida to the north — originally in and around the Tampa Bay area, and then to the south toward Sarasota. But Ian duck-hooked into Lee County and absolutely trashed the place, doing billions of dollars of property damage in the beachfront county of 760,000 people and killing at least 54 people there.

 

Lots of them didn’t evacuate because people don’t like to evacuate their homes when a hurricane comes. Evacuating means you’re a refugee, and it means, all too often, that you end up in a strange place with barely any possessions. Riding out the storm is usually preferable, no matter what the local officials say.

And even in the case of Hurricane Ian, with its 155 mph winds, riding out the storm is generally not fatal.

But sometimes it is. For over 100 people, it was.

And to the media ghouls who have descended on Florida in the aftermath of Ian, TV cameras and stupid questions in tow, those 101 fatalities are golden.

Why? Because with 101 corpses to feast upon, the local officials in Lee County who didn’t sufficiently browbeat the beachfront residents in barrier island communities like Sanibel, Captiva, and Fort Myers Beach are now dessert for what Rush Limbaugh used to call the “drive-by” media.

 

And by extension, those local officials have become proxies for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis is, as Kurt Schlichter described him, the best governor in America. The energy and professionalism he’s shown in both preparedness and recovery efforts, surging supplies and aid to those people who need it, has established a playbook for how to handle a disaster. States that have dealt with natural calamities have looked upon his administration with envy, and he’s burnished his resume not just for reelection this fall but for higher office in the future.

The ghouls wanted so badly to find some flaw in his efforts. They couldn’t wait for Ian to hit Florida and ruin it. Don Lemon beclowned himself — even more than usual — by demanding that an NOAA meteorologist agree that Ian was the product of “climate change,” only to be shut down. As DeSantis has been unenthusiastic (or worse) in paying obeisance to the climate alarmist narrative, he had to be blamed for the hurricane’s intensity.

It didn’t wash.

And now, he’s to blame for Lee County not forcibly evacuating the inhabitants of its beaches.

Here’s how well that went, in case you missed the clip of a CNN reporter attempting to insinuate blame for the loss of life…

There isn’t anything you can do with that if you’re one of the ghouls. He isn’t going to let you feast on the bodies. He’s going to shame you and drive you off.

And eventually, you get reduced to this kind of bitching…

It ends up being so bad that the legacy corporate media takes up for looters (then again, looting, in all of its forms, is a sacrament of the modern Left, so sure — why not?):

That there is zero truth to any of this, at least where it involves connecting the local second-guessing to the governor, doesn’t seem to matter. After all, DeSantis did everything you could ask him to do.

And the most egregious thing about the ghouls preparing to dine upon the dead in Lee County is somehow that people aren’t responsible for their own lives. If you’re on the water and your place lies low to the gulf, and a Category 4 hurricane is due to visit, you shouldn’t need an evacuation order. If you decide to ride it out, that isn’t on the local sheriff, the county commission, or the governor — it’s on you. They aren’t your keepers. Perhaps you have good reason to stay, perhaps you don’t, but we have freedom and responsibility in this country and it’s disgusting that the ghouls of the legacy media disparage it so often.

The desire to politicize this has gotten so bad that it has reached the White House. Check out our own Baghdad Bob, John Kirby, who just had to blame Republicans for “climate change,” which supposedly caused Ian to devastate Lee County:

hhhh, my aching narrative.

This raises a question: Is Ian being weaponized against DeSantis because there is no other way to stop him from blowing out the hapless beta male Charlie Crist in November’s gubernatorial election?

That’s a likely yes. Otherwise, why would you see this idiotic headline coming immediately in the aftermath of Ian?: “DeSantis asked the feds for hurricane relief. But he’s long used their cash.”

Crist’s campaign is somewhat typical of a red-state Democrat these days. It’s built by national Democrat operatives who are far more interested in fleecing blue-state donors than winning an election, and therefore Crist’s messaging — chiefly expressed on a Twitter page that might as well be Rashida Tlaib’s or Adam Schiff’s — seems calibrated for the gubernatorial election in Hawaii or Vermont.

Interestingly enough, though, a Siena College poll released Monday showed Crist getting clobbered 49-41 by DeSantis, suggesting his left-wing pandering is generating a gender gap of some size. DeSantis is eviscerating Crist by a 57-33 margin among men, including these guys (beware some rather colorful language):

…but the poll says Crist leads 48-42 among women.

A 30-point gender gap is hard to believe, and it points to some fairly significant cultural issues in America, which might be worthy of a separate column. Monday at RVIVR, I noted the possibility of an explanation…

I have a theory on this – I’m going to say it’s a reflection of the “shy voter” phenomenon I talked about a few days ago at The Hayride. In that piece, I referenced an appearance Trafalgar Group pollster Robert Cahaly made on Dan Bongino’s Fox News show. Cahaly said pollsters are going to miss on a lot of conservative vote that will be hidden until Election Night because people on the Right simply don’t answer questions from pollsters anymore, and the more aggressively the Biden regime weaponizes law enforcement against people like Donald Trump, the January 6 protesters, Roger Stone and Mark Houck, the more they’re afraid they’ll be put on a list if they express their political views.

And if the “shy voter” phenomenon is a real thing, from a psychographic point of view it would stand to reason that women would be shyer than men. Women tend to be quite a bit more risk-averse than men, and conservative women generally will be married and have families more than men – meaning they’ll feel like they have more to lose if they go on a list.

So some of that gender gap will be Republican women refusing to answer the poll at greater numbers than Democrat women will. And some of it will be Republican women lying to the pollster.

But perhaps some of that gender gap is a reflection of the continuing credibility women — or many of them — still afford to the legacy corporate media.

It isn’t enough, of course. Objectively, DeSantis is giving Florida all it could ask for in a hurricane response and more. And the ghouls are going hungry this week.

 

[Muda69]

Texas Roofer Arrested in Florida for Helping Hurricane Victims

https://reason.com/2022/10/12/texas-roofer-arrested-in-florida-for-helping-hurricane-victims/

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After Hurricane Ian pulverized parts of Florida earlier this month, roofer Terence Duque sprung into action.

Duque has run a successful Texas-based commercial and residential roofing business since 2008. He's got an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and has been named a "preferred contractor" by national roofing supply company Owens Corning. And in the wake of Ian, there's an obvious need for roofers and other contractors in Florida, as cleaning up and repairing the storm's damage will take months, if not years. Duque thought he could help by offering his services to homeowners with damaged roofs in Charlotte County, near where the brunt of the storm hit.

The county's response: "Get him."

Duque was arrested for "conducting business in Charlotte County without a Florida license," the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office announced on Friday. If charged as a felony, that's an offense that could carry up to five years in prison under Florida law—although it's possible that Duque could be charged with only a misdemeanor offense that carries a mere one year of jail time.

Either way, it's an obviously outrageous response.

According to the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office, Duque got busted for his good deed after the Charlotte County Economic Crimes Unit—which is apparently a real thing—received a call from an investigator with the state Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR).

When a detective with the sheriff's office tracked down Duque, the roofer reportedly said he believed he was allowed to work in Florida due to Gov. Ron DeSantis' emergency order that loosened licensing rules in the aftermath of the storm. "The investigator informed Terence that this was not the case, and that Terence would be placed under arrest, as he had already done work in violation of the statute," according to the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office.

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems.

"DBPR does not appear to realize that it is the bad guy here," says Justin Pearson, managing attorney for the Florida office of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm. "When safe, successful businesses come to Florida in the aftermath of a hurricane to provide much-needed assistance, the last thing DBPR should want is for the workers to be arrested and charged with a felony. DBPR is punishing people for doing the right thing."

Pearson notes that 18 states have universal licensing recognition laws—meaning that a license issued in another state is accepted as valid—but Florida is not one of them.

That's convenient protectionism for roofers and other contractors in Florida, but it's terrible news for anyone who needs a new roof right now.

As FloridaPolitics.com noted, Florida's contracting licensing requirements are notoriously strict and costly. It takes four years to get licensed for a variety of residential and commercial construction work in Florida, according to data collected by the Institute for Justice.

Defenders of those licensing schemes argue they are meant to protect consumers from unscrupulous contractors and scammers, but this situation illustrates how consumers are hurt by those same rules. Allowing licensed roofers from other states to work in Florida would help make post-hurricane repairs move more quickly, and would give consumers more choices (and possibly lower prices) even in nonemergency situations.

"These people have been through enough, and I will not allow unlicensed contractors to further victimize them," Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell said in a statement.

Heckuva job, Bill.

Yes, when it comes to inefficient, unyielding government bureaucracy no good dead truly goes unpunished.  Sickening....................