* "President Clinton has declared a federal disaster area in California"

Topics: Subsidy
18 Jan 1994

From: ervan

About time! Oh, they mean because of the earthquake instead of the politics...
Later in the same episode of MacNeil/Lehrer, they had an obvious expert
who said "Oh we only know the big faults. There are 1,000's of faults
that we won't know about until they strike." Yeah, then I realized he
was talking about geology...

Well, Clinton wasted no time rushing in with a reward for building in
an earthquake zone. The news (MacNeil/Lehrer nonetheless, I would
have expected this out of CNN) showed an interview with a guy who
owned a glass shop (curios that is, not plate glass). He was "a double
victim" because he could not afford earthquake insurance which would
have been $30K/year. Hello? Why do you think the insurance company
wants $30K/year? Oh, I'm sure this will be labelled another 'free market
failure'. That insurance was so high proves that this was not some
unforeseeable freak of nature but a perfectly predictable (at least
on average) event.

Now, let's see. We taxed the Californians to pay the Floridians to
rebuild shacks in a hurricane zone (Homestead got 100% coverage
from the feds). We taxed the Floridians to pay Midwestern farmers
to rebuild in the flood plain. And now, finally, we have taxed
Midwestern farmers to pay Californians to rebuild on top of a fault.
Oh, well give or take the 70% the government took for overhead to
redistribute this generosity.

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