"People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election."
There's always a point in these Florida interludes when P and I begin to lose the ability to listen to the political chatter.
"Biden paid for the Hamas attack."
"If Trump were still president, this whole Ukraine war would be over in a week." (because we'd cut off Ukraine and side with the despot, but set that aside if you will).
"We shouldn't spend another dime on Ukraine when we have so much need here at home."
Okay, let's riff on that one a little bit.
As this place observes the fifth anniversary of nearly getting wiped off the face of the earth by Hurricane Michael, the folks back home in Taylor County are getting to live through the aftermath of what one might call the First Post-Tort Reform Storm. That would be Idalia, which came ashore a shade below a Cat 4, and wrecked a swath of the Big Bend.
This photo was taken when I first got to Pine Bluff Road to review the damage at Wyldswood, maybe four or five days after landfall.
Those piles are all still there a month later, waiting for someone to haul them away. I know these things take time, but the pace of recovery has been slowed dramatically by the state's immigration policies, which make it a crime to transport an undocumented alien. This means the waves of workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras who swept into Bay County to put things together after Michael are missing this time.
The absence and its consequences aren't just in my imagination.
‘‘If they catch us they’ll deport us’: DeSantis law hinders Idalia recovery | Hurricane Idalia | The Guardian
The link didn't paste correctly, but you can find the article and a dozen similar pieces online. The workers just aren't here. So if you are a contractor looking to make some money on hurricane cleanup and repair, forget about it. And if you have the money to pay someone to help with clearing downed trees or tarping roofs, you're still stuck doing it yourself.
But, friend, if you live in TayCo in 2023, you probably don't have the money, either. Back in the spring, the Wee Guv and our bootlick legislature hustled through a tort reform measure, just ahead of hurricane season, that guts whatever legal rights you might've had to hold your insurer's feet to the fire. No more attorney's fee awards if you go to court and win. Bad faith becomes virtually nonexistent, no matter how egregious the claims-handling misconduct. And we're seeing it on the ground in Perry, at least from what I'm hearing. Lots of lowball settlement offers. We have top shelf insurance, and I can't get an adjuster even to call me back. And when the cost of Idalia turns out to be a fraction of the actual losses the community has incurred, those in power will hail the success of their tort reform magic.
Meanwhile, the folks back home are tarping their own roofs, and trying to figure out how to pay as they go for repairs that will take perhaps years to complete.
The insurance calculus behind the tort reform legislation is easy enough to understand. An insurance company is basically placing a bet--in fact, the origins of our modern insurance markets lie in London gambling houses that would place bets on when and whether merchant ships would return from voyages to other continents. This is where Lloyds was born.
So, the carrier takes in premiums on the bet that its actuaries have accurately predicted the risk, figuring on paying out most of the premium on claims and keeping some margin for itself. In the age of climate change, however, those risks are harder to predict, and the storms keep getting bigger and nastier. Couple that with a flood of folks into the state, and the carrier now has a problem: if it charges the actual value of the risk, premiums would be so high that few could afford the coverage. And you can't forgo property coverage if you carry a mortgage on your home. Now the cost of relocating to the place where "woke goes to die" becomes prohibitive if you're coming from someplace like, say, western New York, where we pay a fraction of what we pay in Florida to cover a house with a replacement value maybe three times that of Wyldswood (trust me when I tell you we didn't pay that much; it's just damned expensive to rebuilt a 174-year-old house).
At that point, fewer people are coming here. The Wee Guv, or for that matter any governor, now has an optics problem as the U-Hauls quit crossing the state line. On a more direct level, he has a financial problem, because our political system is built around taking care of real estate developers who aren't the least bit concerned about the long-term consequences of their projects, or taking care of the folks who move here--they just need to close that transaction that conveys the crappy little house to the rube from Toledo, then move on to the next cookie-cutter development. If the rube stays back in the Buckeye State because he can't afford the insurance his bank insists he carry, the whole scheme collapses.
What to do? The risk exceeds the market's ability to price it without drying up real estate development. Well, you could do what Florida actually did here--sell "affordable" insurance (still a hell of a lot more than you'd pay in, say, the upper Midwest) so they keep moving here, but change the rules so the insurance company doesn't actually pay the claims in full when the inevitable storm crushes some Florida community. Problem solved!
Unless, of course, you live here and get hit by a storm that carries away your roof and sends a tree crashing through your barn. You're not the market the tort reform legislation was meant to protect. Meaning you're S.O.L.
But enough of that. I need to get ready to mediate a wrongful death case here in a few minutes, clients are squawking for last-minute calls before we start, and I need to slip on a tie. At least the walk to the office this morning was lovely, and I guess that's what keeps folks coming here in spite of the insanity.
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