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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

"It is a flawed model that is sucking society dry but this is how America is set up."

This article is about a problem of how Florida, specifically, is set up.

To the downvoter - perhaps you didn't read the article, don't know about Florida's P&C regulatory problems, or wanted to make another point. But from the article:

"The Office of Insurance Regulation said in a statement that the study was not given to lawmakers because it was “not a formal examination report.” It was produced months before lawmakers met in emergency legislative sessions in 2022 and left in a “draft” status."

Florida knew this, and was surpressing this, because the state executive branch is corrupt and in a state of regulatory capture.

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Yes, and that’s why it’s relevant: Florida has a major problem which can’t be solved by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist, and the legislative climate won’t allow actual fixes. Republicans have ensured that climate change is hitting everyone as hard as possible, and blocked corporate accountability or regulation, and prevented raising taxes to have the government step in, and neither party is willing to acknowledge the negative consequences of having home equity be the primary retirement fund for most people. There’s no way to make the current model work and the alternatives are blocked.

Agreed. It's trivially easy to manipulate suggestible people and say "this is why the system doesn't work" instead of really understanding something complex.

The system works. It is broken in Florida, but Florida broke it and has corruptly and incompetently swept the problem under the rug for a couple of decades while luring people with unsustainably low taxes and insurance premiums. That is beginning to unravel in a way that cannot be hidden.

I don’t think we can say the system really works as much as it’s failing slower in other areas. We keep bumping into reminders that the post-WWII era was something of an anomaly rather than a steady state. Florida is a front runner because it’s both unusually highly exposed and ideologically captured but I think much of the country isn’t far behind - just basic things like roads and sewers aren’t sustainable in many areas without increased taxes, and a lot of people do not have much margin for that. An awful lot of infrastructure is around its design lifetime already and much of that will be getting hit with increased climate stress.

We also tax at a much lower rate than we did in the post-WW2 era.

Yes - there are many areas where we could have the government soften blows, except that decades of spending by rich people have convinced large swathes of the population to believe that’s a moral peril.

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