Did California Arson Itself For BidenBux? Is Florida Innocent Of "Hurricane"? Byron Donalds says YES!

Shockingly, Donalds is a Republican from Florida. Who could have foreseen that?

I thought you would rather look at pretty clouds than raging flames.

If you are a regular reader of Michael Mora over on Wonkette (which you should be!) then you already know that House Rep. Byron Donalds was on CNN’s Sunday morning interview show State of the Union doing interview-type things related to the election, Donald Trump, and disasters. This makes sense as the upcoming presidential election in which Trump is running threatens to be a disaster for Florida and everyone else. Since I am not as ambitious as Mr. Mora, I’ve cued the video to the relevant bit and then stolen Mora’s Wonkette transcription of the piece that is the subject of today’s post. That section is a question about Trump threatening to withhold disaster aid to California during wildfire season and then Donalds’ answer justifying (or attempting to) Trump’s sickening threat.

DONALDS: I think, when you look at Florida versus California, taking in hurricane-force winds and massive flooding is one thing. There's not much the state of Florida can do to prevent that. You compare that with California's environmental policy, a lot of their forest fires are mostly caused because the state of California blocks the management of their lands. They don't clear the underbrush. We do that here in Florida, which is why you don't have the major issues of massive forest fires raging through our state. But California doesn't do the simple work of clearing underbrush.

I am not a forest policy expert or a public lands policy expert or even an raking the underbrush expert so I can’t say for sure that California does literally nothing to “block the management of their lands”. But I can say that the land in California is 47.7% federally owned. This includes US Forest Service land, national parks, and more. 40% of the 33 million acres of California forests are privately owned or 13 million. Of the publicly owned forests in the state, 20 million or so acres are federal. That leaves, very roughly, zero millions of acres in state hands. Not that California has no forests owned by the state government, but what they do have doesn’t add up to much when you’re counting by the millions.

In other words, if there is a problem in California’s forests, it’s mostly a problem with the feds, not the state, and what remains is overwhelmingly a problem with private owners — again, not the state.

So Donalds’ response is already deeply misleading if not outright false, but I want to get to something deeper here. Donalds’ justification for Trump’s threat to withhold aid is fundamentally based on the idea that there are deserving disaster victims and undeserving ones, with Florida the former and California the latter. And this distinction is justified by insisting that California’s disasters are preventable while Florida’s disasters are not.

This stance elides something important: the disaster is not the fire, or the wind, or the flood. The disaster is the death or displacement of people and the destruction of homes, businesses, and other necessities of human life. A fire destroying 50 acres of palm trees on a deserted island is a wildfire, but it’s not a disaster. Lahaina was a disaster.

It is true that there are ways to manage fires to reduce risk to people and structures and no way to manage hurricanes. But that’s not the same as saying that Florida’s public policy cannot reduce or increase the risk. Building codes are just one of the ways that governments can protect people and property, and while California is fairly aggressive in regulating behaviours that increase risks from fire, Florida has been particularly regulation averse over the past few years. Donalds is mendacious and immoral, but that’s a topic worth talking about.

Often in public policy there are two competing philosophies to addressing a problem -- harm reduction and eradication. Harm reduction is absolutely necessary. You don't want people to suffer more than necessary while you're waiting on elimination policies to work. But eradication is far more preferable in the long run, if you can get there. There are some policy areas, however, where the philosophies don't compete much because one approach overwhelms the other.

With drug use we have historically seen eradication dominate and harm reduction approaches demonized as a result. On the level of public policy, we decided for decades that we don't care if addicts hurt or die.

With natural disasters harm reduction overwhelms eradication. You can argue that since we can never fully eradicate natural disasters that the intense focus on harm reduction makes sense, but this misunderstands the eradication approach as a tyrannical all-or-nothing strategy that is really only familiar to us in the context of drug abuse policy. There is far more that we could do to avoid tragedies before they happen. You don't want to depopulate Tampa in a week because of Milton, but it is possible to ban new wood frame construction. Concrete dome houses, for instance, are incredibly resistant to hurricane wind damage and if you require all living spaces to be elevated (allow parking underneath if you like) flood damage is also largely avoided. (You'll have to relandscape and maybe replace a car, but the home will be fine.)

The problem with drug policy was that we don't care about other people if we see their suffering as resulting from their bad choices. The problem with disaster mitigation is that we don't see the bad choices that keep happening between the storms.

Building structures that don't need to be rebuilt after the normal and expected once-in-a-decade disasters might increase costs and affect local affordability, but skyrocketing insurance from recurring bailouts also affect costs and increase local affordability. Bizarrely, we treat the first as the fault of elected officials and vote them out of office if they make reasonable long-term decisions for the benefit of the community, but the second we treat as the random result of an unpredictable Mother Nature.

But these costs are predictable in the largest sense, not precise to the dollars and not precise to the home, but county by county and billion by billion actuaries do make predictions of future disaster costs, and make them with great accuracy. Donalds would have you believe that California’s harm reduction priority is wrong, and that if the state doesn’t eradicate fire it does not deserve help. Conversely, he appeals to the common sense of everyone but Marjorie Taylor Greene and her disciples that hurricanes cannot be eradicated, and since this is true the feds should spend any number of dollars on rebuilding Florida’s homes exactly where they were and exactly how they were.

But eradicating the hurricane is not necessary to eradicate hurricane deaths, and Florida could also do far more to reduce the long term costs of owning and living on properties in the state. As expensive as it might be for ordinary dwellings to be made from hurricane-proof materials and to elevate living areas, it is cheaper than rebuilding repeatedly.

At some point we need to face the costs of living in certain areas (the areas of New Orleans that are below sea level, much of Florida, waterless deserts in Arizona and California) and accept that if the market decides that building up to codes that prevent recurring costs is too expensive, then the land in an area can be left undeveloped or even have its existing buildings removed to return the area to its natural state.

Now that can happen after a season of multiple horrible hurricanes followed by an inability to get affordable insurance, and it probably will happen that way. But it would be so much better if we could plan for this in advance because the economic effects of planned limits on building are much easier on the human beings of an area than the economic effects of a sudden depopulation in the wake of hurricanes like Helene and Milton.

Donalds’ arguments justifying abandoning California’s fire victims is immoral, while his insistence on perpetual bailouts for Florida’s property owners is pound-foolish. It’s only virtue, if it can be called that, is that it appeals to the voters who will decide whether Donalds keeps his job.

Given his district he probably will, but he, too, is a disaster, and until we can eradicate his political career, reducing the harms he causes will continue to be expensive in money and time.

Crip Dyke also writes for the delightfully cussmouthed Wonkette!