RUSH: Here’s Mike in Melbourne, Florida. Mike, you’re next on Open Line Friday. Hello.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: We need to talk about a new government scheme involving flood insurance that’s going to victimize more and more people across the country. As you know, the government is the sole provider of flood insurance policies. Well, it turns out that FEMA is in the process of redrawing all of their boundaries to determine who is in a flood-hazard zone and who isn’t. Well, a few days ago I received a letter from my mortgage company saying that FEMA had informed them that my property is now in a flood-hazard zone and federal law required them to force me to purchase flood insurance. I’ve looked online, and there is, in fact, such a law. It’s called the National Flood Insurance Reform Act of 1994.
RUSH: The “reform act” makes you a new customer.
CALLER: Yes. What it does is it requires anyone with a government-backed mortgage to secure flood insurance if at any time during the loan the property becomes located in a flood-hazard zone. So you can immediately see what this is. This is the government’s drawing up the rules —
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute. Isn’t pretty much every mortgage government backed through Fannie and Freddie, ultimately?
CALLER: Well, it’s probably headed that way, yes.
RUSH: Yeah, but so —
CALLER: You can see how many people this is going to be affecting.
RUSH: Right, right, right and they can just arbitrarily draw a flood zone and put you in it.
CALLER: That’s exactly right, and you probably know the flood insurance program is running a $1 trillion deficit because they’ve been subsidizing people for years and years. They’ve been building on floodplains at low rates and this is going to cover it. It’s nothing more than a backhanded tax increase, and it’s potentially going to cost you thousands and thousands of dollars. Because once you’re in a flood zone, now you’ve got to pay the jacked up rates for a special hazard zone as opposed to a preferred risk policy.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: There are absolutely no rules I can see anywhere that determine, you know, exactly how they draw these zones.
RUSH: So what are you gonna do about this? What do you think can be done?
CALLER: I have tried… I am beginning to look for lawyers that will help me in a class-action lawsuit against the government. I tried contacting Mark Levin’s legal foundation. They told me they couldn’t help me; I would need to go through a Florida lawyer. This is just beginning. I’ve also contacted Senator Rubio’s office. So we’ll see where this leads, but I can’t believe this can happen in the United States.
RUSH: Oh, I can. I can. This sounds made to order. This is the exact kind of thing that government does to recoup spending that they’ve blown.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, do not disregard our previous caller. This is hidden taxation. It’s another way for the Regime to redistribute wealth, and it’s all done in a stealth way, and it doesn’t require the bad PR of a tax increase. Nobody knows about it except the people to whom it happens. And basically he was right on the money. FEMA is simply redrawing floodplains. They’re simply declaring that if you happen to live in an area they deem to be a floodplain, and then if your mortgage is backed by the government, then you have to buy flood insurance.
You may have never purchased flood insurance before because there’s never been a flood where you live. But FEMA, in concert with the EPA, can simply declare, “Well, you know what? Our computer models that say it’s gonna raise two degrees in a hundred years say there might be a big 100-year flood in the next 80 years where you live, and, as such, you need to have insurance.” It’s simply a way — the government’s gonna go get money wherever they can, and they’re gonna get it from people they think have it, be it pension plans or savings accounts or what have you.
There’s a story out of Dallas from their ABC affiliate WFAA, same thing happened in Midlothian.
“At first glance it’s a nice neighborhood in Midlothian. But it didn’t look so good recently from inside the mailbox of resident Janet Allen who received a notice from her mortgage company that she was in a ‘Zone A Special Flood Hazard Area.’ Allen says she thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? I don’t have the money to pay for this insurance and it is just devastating to me.’
“Allen was told FEMA had re-evaluated her property and it was now designated as being in the floodplain with no real explanation why. ‘It makes me mad,Â’ she said. ‘It makes me very angry.Â’ Â… A Midlothian city official explained there has been a veritable flood of properties newly listed as flood prone in maps just put out by the feds. There are hundreds of new additions from several Midlothian subdivisions–each of them going through what Janet Allen is experiencing, ‘ItÂ’s been real depressing.Â’ Â… Allen and some of her neighbors are now in the process of spending hundreds of dollars each to get a new elevation survey done on their properties so they can try to appeal the flood zone characterization. The reason for the increase in properties in the floodplain in Ellis County is that the area was recently re-mapped by FEMA. The agency says better mapping technology and changes in runoff because of new development is driving many of the increases.”
ItÂ’s just arbitrary. It’s happening all over, and it’s a stealth way of raising taxes. I mean, it’s the federal government selling the insurance. Uh, no, it’s the federal government demanding that you buy it. So keep a sharp eye. You could live in a place where there hasn’t ever been a flood and all of a sudden get one of these notices that you now live in a potential floodplain, and, as such, you have to have flood insurance from the federal government and here’s what it costs.
It’s these kind of things not happening with acts of Congress, and how much of this — here’s another thing — how much of this is being done to support this insidious hoax of climate change? I mean, how many people are getting these notices because climate change models are forecasting sea level rises of four feet in the next century, and it could result in a flood in your neighbor. Don’t doubt for a minute that that’s what’s driving some of this. And driving it in the sense of warranting it. “Oh, yeah, global warming, oh, yeah, I’m really worried about it.” Well, you could live in a flood zone now because of global warming. What are you gonna do? Because you’ve always bought into it. So don’t think for a minute that it is climate change undergirding this — or not undergirding this; it is. Flood insurance has gone up because of rising sea levels. It’s gonna be very easy for ’em to say this, even though it’s all a hoax.
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