Hurricane Gustav has been downgraded and is looking to spare the more densely populated areas along the Gulf Coast. How joyous it is they will experience nothing on the scale of Katrina.

And how joyous it is that we won’t have to pay for it.

Since we dodged a bullet this time, what’s say we use the time before the next inevitable disaster to scrap a system where taxpayers shell out billions of dollars to people who build homes in high risk areas?

It's time they buckled down and got their own insurance.

Be it water, wind, tremors or fire, if people decide to live on a flood plain, a forest, a fault line or “Tornado Alley,” they should accept the risks and shoulder the cost. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which oversees assistance and cash disbursement, has been subsidizing these folks for too long.

As the Cato Institute stated in a report on FEMA:

“By using taxpayer dollars to provide disaster relief and subsidized insurance, FEMA itself encourages Americans to build in disaster-prone areas and makes the rest of us pick up the tab for those risk decisions. In a well-functioning private marketplace, individuals who chose to build houses in flood plains or hurricane zones would bear the cost of the increased risk through higher insurance premiums. FEMA's activities undermine that process...This $4 billion-a-year agency should be abolished.”

That report was from several years back. Since then the budget has ballooned to $8 billion-a-year. More money, same problem.

Another byproduct of having a federal safety net is that local governments, knowing that FEMA will come in and bail them out, spend less money shoring up potentially dangerous areas.

And FEMA is riddled with an incompetent and at times deceitful group of people.

During the 2007 California fires, FEMA actually staged its own press conference to avoid looking bad in the media. As hard as it is to fathom, Deputy Administrator Harvey E. Johnson stood at a podium taking questions from FEMA employees posing as reporters.

Real reporters were given only 15 minutes notice of the press conference --thus left with no choice but to phone in to a conference call which was set up in “listen only" mode. Fox and CNN ran a live feed as the faux-reporters tossed Johnson softballs like, “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”, along with other questions that were framed in a way to evoke positive responses.

It's not that FEMA is completely useless. There should be some kind of disaster relief fund that would feed and temporarily shelter people, but helping them rebuild their homes in the same location is Einstein's definition of insanity: "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

With more people paying into private insurance, the price will naturally come down as the higher cash reserves allow companies to lower the rates.

And with all the money being squandered by a poorly mismanaged agency, it is time to give something else a try. There is no reason why taxpayers should chip in on rebuilding someone's summer beach house.

Bobby McGill
http://idlewordship.com

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The woman in my avatar is Cristina Scabbia and the woman in my profile picture is Tarja Turunen
Sun flames and moons glow, timeless the tides will flow, what will I face, what will be mine, fortune and fate the other side...

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for the victims of the latest earthquake in China.
[not to the Dalai Fuehrer, though].

That's great... some of my family did too, but they did so by choice. Not by a government mandated subsidy.

I think more than anything, the stopping of such readily available funding would encourage people to get their own insurance.