A box of steaks for every earthquake victim!

Wisconsin is unique. Maybe to a fault.
Except through court-ordered "financial responsibility," state drivers don't need to carry one dime of automotive liability insurance.
What seems to some like a pleasant throwback to the days of covered wagons and liveries run by guys named "Bronc," others see as a ridiculous liability to the rest of the taxpayers.
Since accidents happen and someone has to pay, it might seem like both sides are right.
But what is it about insurance that suddenly people are afraid to file claims for a service they purchased?
The Insurance Quagmire hit me like a bag of bricks a couple summers back when a tree fell on our old camper, and a month later my wife's new Chrysler was nailed with a golfball-sized piece of trap rock with a terminal velocity of over 100 mph.
I won’t even get into the mud flap on dumptrucks diatribe.
That piece of stone left a hole in the windshield so large, snowballs, birds and airborne dandelions were a threat.
But because we have had two “deer incidents” in the past couple years, our agent was concerned that we risked being dropped with claims so close together.
Forget the box of steaks - the perforated windshield was on our checkbook.
Better save that ‘last claim’ for something worth claiming, like a hailstorm, or when a meteor falls through the ceiling.
But the gods of Happenstance would never be so cruel, would they?
Turns out they would.
You see, we've all been misled. We take for granted that incidents previously referred to as "acts of God" - deer collisions, rocks through windshields, trees falling on stuff - did not truly count against us, or make us less worthy of insurance coverage.
We were wrong. Several official agencies, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, no longer even say the phrase “car accidents.” Every “bending metal” incident in a car is now officially called a "crash."
That's right, according to the insurance folk, there is no such thing as an accident anymore. Everything can be avoided; from the rocks thrown by the semi, to deer galloping into your Buick, to that meteorite through the roof.
And we're being charged accordingly.
Not that we shouldn't be, since someone has to pay for everything. But at what point do we draw the line? And should fault lines be one of those we don't draw around?
Since the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, people have fudged on insurance rates and estimates. Recent studies proved that officials understated the event’s true cost and deaths – since fire insurance covered your home or business if your neighbor’s structure caused the fire. It is almost amazing how many circa 1900 cheap rowhouses survived that earthquake, only to fall to a neighbor’s fire.
Amazingly, that earthquake did little to wreck the city. It was just the other guy’s building catching fire that caused all the destruction. Actual damage may have been ten times more than revealed.
We've all been paying to rebuild San Francisco for the past century, all because of a big, grand insurance fraud.
What about areas in Missouri near the New Madrid fault line? A major earthquake is ‘inevitable,’ according to seismologists. Ditto near Yellowstone, where science types insist the whole region will explode like Mike Tyson at a drunken sorority party.
We'll pay for them eventually, also - not the Mike Tyson thing - but all the rest for sure.
Should we pay for people to rebuild even bigger homes on fault lines, or in flood plains, or beside fire-prone forests, or on coastal hurricane routes, or where it seems a lot of meteorites have been falling?
I say no, at least not with our insurance backing.
Since Sept. 11, the reality of insurance and the true responsibility of the nation as a whole has changed, as have everybody's rates.
Double-digit rises in coverage costs have crippled school districts, municipalities, counties, companies and even individuals, who are now paying to maintain the same levels of insurance industry profit.
I'm not saying insurance companies don't have the right to windfall profits, I just think they've missed the point: They lived high on the hog for decades, and when the bottom finally dropped out (Sept. 11), they go running to us (the government) to make up for their poor planning.
Yes, with that vastly overpriced Chrysler windshield (estimates ranged from $270 to $600!) I am paying for a little bit of the World Trade Center, probably the Grand Forks flood, and maybe even Hurricane Floyd and the 1906 Bay Area quake.
We've been misled, thinking that if we are "safe" drivers (no tickets or accidents) and follow the rules, we'll be compensated for nature's twists of destruction.
It is safe to say that if low-income consumers are forced to choose between food, insurance and rent payments, insurance will be the "gray duck."
By making liability insurance mandatory, we may reduce the risk to society in general, but we create criminals of the poor.
But what is the risk to society if drivers have no insurance? Do we behave better? Drive safer? Or should we all drive junky "winter beaters" so we can bounce off trees, dump trucks and homes?
I used to joke that the time to have a rock hit a windshield is a couple days prior to a dinner party- so you could have a box of steaks for the guests.
Of course, we'll end up paying for those steaks many times over.
Someone always has to pay.
Lets just make sure it’s the right folks.