The Florida primary election is in a couple of weeks so right around now is when most Floridians will start thinking about their choices. Here’s an proposal by the leading Democrat, David Jolly (until yesterday, a Republican!), to set up, without legislative approval, a massive state-run insurance company for hurricane and wind damage:
Unless insurance companies are making 60-70% profits right now, how the only way that state-run enterprise that Mx. Jolly proposes to start can cut costs by 60-70% is by transferring those costs from Florida homeowners to Florida renters (i.e., it will lose money over the years, but get topped up periodically by infusions of tax dollars that are collected from a combination of homeowners (who get them back via this subsidized insurance) and renters (who don’t get any money back)).
This makes Jolly the inverse of Ayatollah Mamdani, whose rent freeze steals from property owners (landlords) and gives it to renters in the form of rent that gets lower every year relative to the market and lower also in real dollars because “frozen” means not adjusted even for CPI inflation. I suppose that there are also some similarities with the Mamdani Caliphate, e.g., (1) voters will easily accept the idea that a state-run enterprise, e.g., Mamdani’s city grocery stores, can have lower costs than a private enterprise, and (2) voters are eager to vote for a politician who promises to transfer wealth from some other group into their own pockets.
Maybe insurance companies actually do make 60-70% profits in Florida? Here’s our Florida-centric homeowner’s insurance company’s KBRA risk rating report. It looks like they broke even in 2022 (Hurricane Ian) and made a 10% profit in 2025 (no hurricanes made landfall anywhere in the U.S.).
(The state-run enterprise, especially if private insurance is outlawed as the tweet seems to suggest, could perhaps also steal from homeowners in low-risk areas, e.g., central Florida, and give to homeowners in high-risk coastal areas. That could be accomplished by smoothing out what should be massive rate differences between these types of neighborhoods. One more possibility is stealing from people who live in new houses by overcharging them and using that surplus to undercharge people in old hurricane-vulnerable houses.)
Finally, as a minor fact-check point in a field (politics) where nobody cares about facts, the Florida homeowners insurance market has not actually collapsed. Rates are trending down, especially after inflation adjustment, after some legislative changes during the DeSantis administration that cut back on litigation between homeowners and insurers.
Related:
In case the above tweet is memory-holed…
Downstream effect of the emphasis on home ownership and having most of your wealth tied up in a house where you live. Nobody is clamoring for S&P500 insurance
Gootube is awash in tales of rent hyperinflation down there. The government continues trading it against falling wages. Renters already subsidize mortgage interest, down payments, & solar panels in Calif*. Hooray for a blog post that wasn’t AI generated.