Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Saturday, February 18. 2006

High Water: Flood Insurance

The National Flood Insurance Program is bankrupt. Not recently. That means that taxpayers are subsidizing building in flood zones, flood plains, and areas with high risk of natural water disasters - and thus encouraging, rather than discouraging, stupid behavior by making it economically risk-free to the individual.

For reasons of principle, conservation, and common sense, this subsidy should end. If you chose to live in such a high-risk place, you should carry the risk, not me.  Flood Insurance should be a purely commercial enterprise, the same as any other aspect of homeowner's insurance. Not retroactively, but in the future. Somehow, I doubt anyone in DC cares about this every much, but the Katrina costs should be a chance to reconfigure this insurance/subsidy scam.

From Burnett at TCS:

When people own property and are fully responsible for losses due to their poor land use or development decisions, they are less likely to build or rebuild in areas regularly prone to flooding or erosion. This link -- between a person's property ownership and responsibility for their land use decisions -- disciplines people who use their property badly.

Unfortunately, a host of government programs break this link by subsidizing unwise development. All too often the result is lost lives, destroyed property and diminished livelihoods. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) flood control program and federal flood insurance subsidize construction in flood-prone areas and encourage high-risk development by shifting the cost of insurance and physical protection against floods from property owners to taxpayers. The result: more construction in high risk areas. Its economics 101 -- if you subsidize something you get more of it.

I guess politics trumps logic, every time. Read entire. (Image from New Orleans)

Posted by Bird Dog in Natural History and Conservation at 15:10 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Feeeeeeeeelings.
Nothing more than Feeeeeeeeelings.
Trying to forget my................
#1 gumshoe on 2006-02-19 09:36 (Reply)
haha
#2 bird dog on 2006-02-19 11:24 (Reply)
imo,the people on the ground can't see past the devastation,
and the rest of us basically have a very feeble grasp of the scope of the damage.

on a more hopeful note...
this article by Deroy Murdock at NRO
mentions a US Rep. Richard Baker(R)-Baton Rouge,
who propsed a Development Corp.
to expire in 10 years,that would make the
devastated NO real estate market even
remotely viable...the undertaking is so vast,
there's not gonna be much happening with
some kind of Federal help...the issues
are what kind of help and
*for how long*...and for God's sake
*build it above the waterline*.

i fear that last one is gonna get blown right by.


Baker in New Orleans (02/10)
Rebuilding the Big Easy

Deroy Murdock at NRO

excerpt:

"Congressman Richard Baker believes New Orleans and its environs can come back, if they can rebuild their housing stock and thus begin rehabilitating battered communities. The Baton Rouge Republican's proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation (LRC) appears to be the only coherent plan for revitalizing the tempest-tossed Bayou State. It deserves the proper hearing it will get before the Senate Banking Committee February 15.

Baker's bill, H.R. 4100, would issue Treasury bonds to create a $30 billion revolving-loan fund. Owners of Louisiana's 240,000 damaged or destroyed homes and small businesses voluntarily could sell their property to the LRC. It would pay owners 60 percent of their equity and lenders up to 60 percent of their mortgage receivables. The LRC would consolidate these distressed or demolished properties and auction them off to private developers. Sales revenues would repay bondholders. Original owners could ask for first dibs on revitalized properties. The LRC would expire after 10 years.

Also, Baker's $30 billion revolving-loan fund would collect and repay 60 cents on the dollar. Even if it underwrote 40 cents on the dollar, that would involve a $12 billion outlay, not the full $30 billion.

"In this case, there is basically no market. As such, people have little or no options," Baker told BayouBuzz.com. Baker, who launched a still-operating real-estate agency at age 22 and enjoys a 91 percent lifetime American Conservative Union rating, added: "The situation calls for an unprecedented solution, through a corporation that basically remakes the market, reintroduces market forces, gets property back into commerce in a necessarily more comprehensive approach, and then gradually recedes from the marketplace over time."

http://www.nationalreview.com/murdock/murdock200602100923.asp

dunno what unexamined problems the proposal presents
(building BELOW the waterline again??)
or what it's chances are in the Congress,
but it's the first coherent attempt i've heard of to address the rebuilding process.
#3 gumshoe on 2006-02-19 17:29 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.