I'm fine with a bailout as long as we take the appropriate share of the company along with it. And once we own it, there's no more turning people away either since you've already turned your company into a state asset.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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America's a corporate dictatorship. You and I both know this will never happen without a regime change.
That isn't what's happening.
This is basically just a tax, levied on all private home insurers in Cali, to go toward making up FAIR's budget shortfall.
50% of the tax is allowed to pass through to home owners, 50% gets eaten by the private insurers.
So short term, what this does is basically raise premiums on everyone in a non high fire danger area in Cali, to pay for people on FAIR, in high fire danger areas, functionally punishing people with safer homes to reward people with riskier homes.
Medium term, this will encourage even more private insurers to just leave Cali, stop offering new homeowners insurance, which will then exacerbate FAIR's liabilities even more.
If by 'the company' you mean 'private home insurers'... no, this isn't buying shares in Progressive or USAA or Travelers, this isn't nationalizing a or a part of a private company at a state level, seizing its assets or w/e.
EDIT:
You could theoretically organize a state level soverign wealth fund with the goal of buying enough shares in private insurers to do some kind of hostile takeover, then break off those companies' Cali divisions and merge their assets and liabilities into FAIR... but that almost certainly would not work.
A state in the US has no legal authority to just outright seize assets of a multi state corporation. They can do it on an individual level with civil asset forfeiture, they can do it with certain property via emminent domain, but insurance is a service, with funds spread around and between states.
If Cali tried to do that, they'd instantly run afoul of the interstate commerce clause, and probably many others.
So... unless we're talking about California seceeding, declaring itself its own country, and rewriting its own new legal system... that's not gonna happen.
EDIT 2:
Sorry folks, but the actual takeaway from all this is that California is as financially fucked from fires as Florida is from hurricanes and floods.
Climate change is here, the smarter people and more financially capable will move to less dangerous areas, the poor who can't afford to move will get fucked, the dumb who think it won't be more expensive than they can afford will also get fucked.
Welcome to the start of the US's internal migrant crisis.
Ah, the FAIR Plan’s latest bailout is peak California kabuki theater. Insurers fleece homeowners under the guise of “solvency” while regulators nod along, pretending this isn’t a transfer of corporate risk to the public. Classic regulatory capture—Lara’s “consumer protection” doublespeak would be laughable if it weren’t so corrosive.
Wildfires now fund shareholder dividends. The assessment’s 50/50 split? A veneer of shared sacrifice masking systemic rot. Insurers offload losses onto policies they already priced to oblivion, then lobby for rules letting them double-dip. Consumer Watchdog’s legal threats? Band-Aids on a hemorrhage.
We’re trapped in a burnout loop. Same fault lines, same failed mitigations, same communities footing the bill. Thirty years since the last bailout, and we’ve learned nothing but how to monetize despair. The market isn’t “unbalanced”—it’s rigged.