River News: Our View

Like most Americans — we are a curious type — many people spend at least part of their week wondering why they don’t have any money in their bank accounts, despite hard work and careful budgeting.

Just dare go to the grocery store and it’s Paupersville for you.

It’s not just groceries. As many of you may have noticed, and as we report today, auto insurance rates are going up, home insurance rates are sky high and flying higher, liability insurance is crazy, and, you name it, buying any kind of insurance is increasingly leaving people more vulnerable to financial catastrophe, which is exactly the opposite of the point of insurance in the first place.

In Wisconsin alone, car insurance premiums are expected to increase by a total of 25 percent by the end of the year, year-over-year.

The question is, why is insurance so out of control?

The answer depends upon whom you ask. If you ask your friendly Democratic politician, for example, it’s a no-brainer. It’s obviously climate change, and you’re stupid for not knowing that. 

That’s right, human-caused climate change is wreaking havoc on the climate, and sparking extreme weather events, and that’s causing all kinds of property damages, not to mention injuries and deaths, and that’s driving up all your premiums and insurance costs.

If you don’t believe us, just take a look at the official website of the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance (there’s a Stalinist name for a bureaucracy if ever we heard one) and they’ll confirm it. This is what it says about “the face of our changing climate.” 

“Wisconsin faces many threats: flooding, wildfires, tornadoes, extreme temperatures, and man-made disasters,” the website states. “In recent years, Wisconsin has experienced more intense and frequent heavy rains causing flooding, washed out roads and bridges, failed dams, injury, and illness. Help reduce the impact from these disasters by understanding risk and taking action to minimize potential damage from hazards before they occur.”

And how do we do that? Well, according to the insurance commissioner’s office, we and our local communities are supposed to pursue “mitigation opportunities,” working closely with government “partners” such as the Department of Safety and Professional Services and Department of Financial Institutions, to overcome “climate resiliency barriers” in pursuing said mitigation.

In other words, we are supposed to pay higher taxes for infrastructure we don’t really need. If we don’t go along — you guessed it, the commonsense asking of questions is the climate resiliency barrier they are talking about — we will be penalized in the form of higher premiums charged by the government’s insurance partners, a penalty for failure to prepare for certain climate-change catastrophe and the subsequent need for a higher risk assessment.

Oh, and by the way, because they don’t want to get caught by surprise, the insurance companies are going to estimate how risk-prone your area is, and set premiums accordingly, whether the community prepares or not. 

The thinking is, whatever infrastructure there is, isn’t enough. So, on the front end, weather catastrophe doesn’t have to actually happen, it just needs to be anticipated. You get charged whether you prepare or not.

And, of course, if extreme weather events do happen, that will inflate costs even more, and there will be the need for new infrastructure and on and on. As they say, the circle remains unbroken.

It all really sounds good, except for one teensy-weensy problem: It’s all a hoax.

Mind you, we are not saying climate change is a hoax. The climate is always changing, it’s just the human-driven part that is all baloney.

Second, while Wisconsin has definitely suffered some extreme weather events over the past five years, it’s not clear that the pattern is any more extreme or permanent than previous five-year periods, when insurance rates did not skyrocket.

For instance, over the past five years extreme weather events have caused about $9.7 billion in damage in the state. But that’s not much more than the $8 billion in damages caused in the years 2004-2008, and there were $5-billion cost years in 2008 and dating back to 1993.

Maybe the latest extreme weather is more than a recurring surge, but, even then, it’s a stretch to say the higher insurance rates you are seeing is caused by those weather events.

Rather, they are being caused in part by those buying the climate-change religion and who are convinced that such fire-and-brimstone events will occur. In other words, the belief in climate change rather than climate change itself is causing rates to rise. 

Beyond that, more inflation is caused, more than anything, by Democrats and their economic policies.

First, in Wisconsin, there’s a tough regulatory climate — the preferred way Democrats like to imprison their citizens. Motorists here have to pay an uninsured motorist fee that only 20 states have, to cite one example.

Then there is the rising costs associated with auto repairs — not necessarily more accidents but more expensive repairs, especially in high-tech cars. And there’s higher priced cars, which come with higher-priced insurance policies.

As for home construction, material costs have increased dramatically, with one analyst estimating that replacement costs related to homeowners insurance increased by 55 percent between 2020 and 2022. 

Again, rising prices mean rising insurance rates. Or, to say it another way, Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s inflation policies have caused a chain reaction — higher costs for car repairs and higher priced cars and homes mean higher insurance rates as insurance companies scramble to recoup their underwriting losses and undervalued dollars.

Apart from inflation, there are higher costs associated with car theft — another problem that can be laid at the doorstep of Democratic politicians and prosecutors who refuse to charge criminals for such crimes as home burglaries, vandalism, and auto theft.

Insurers also cite traffic congestion from high-population density — that’s due to restrictive zoning and progressives’ desire to herd everyone into smaller and denser residential zones, sometimes called 15-minute cities. Again, Democratic policies.

And then there is Covid, which spiked reckless driving. For whatever reason, lousy driving since the pandemic has resulted not only in more accidents and in more fatalities but in more severe claims in general — and higher costs.

Some people say people began to drive recklessly on empty roads during the pandemic and never relinquished their bad habits. In addition, careless driving continued without significant law enforcement response since officers were often busy responding to other emergencies.

And, as we reported, there were other pandemic impacts — closed schools, no work or church or other contact outside the home — that drove a mental health crisis and even riskier behavior, on the roadways and elsewhere.

And whose policies contributed to that mental health nightmare and loss of independence and civil liberties? Send your thanks to the Democratic Party, the soulmate of de facto civilian incarceration.

There is certainly climate change going on in the world, there’s no denying that. Some of it is human caused. But none of it is causing higher insurance premiums, except in very limited and specific circumstances in a few specific geographic locations.

The larger problem is the increase in rates pulsing throughout the economy, and the Democrats are to blame for most of it. They are responsible for actual economic inflation, and they are responsible for the social inflation pushing insurance ever higher caused by unrealistic fear of climate change.

If ever there was a time to change leadership in Washington, it is now, and insurance rates are just more exclamation points in a paragraph of dramatic punctuation.

The Democrats need to go. Punctuate that.