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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.

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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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