This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 19th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown. Federal flood insurance is meant to help people handle

unforeseeable weather events. Instead, it's become a subsidy to wealthy coastal

homeowners and it serves little purpose to the average taxpayer.

Ike Brannon is co-author of a forthcoming Cato paper, the National Flood Insurance Program we spoke last week.

Flood insurance was adopted to be a public spirited just trying to help federal program.

That's right.

We saw images of people who were flooded out of their homes in the 1960s.

They didn't have adequate insurance and people thought golly the government

needs to step in and help these people and from that largest developed a the program we have

now where the federal government provides flood insurance, almost anyone

who wants it and for people who are in especially flood-prone areas, they're getting a subsidy.

So what are the most flood-prone areas in the United States?

The main one is in the southeast, right?

It's flood prone because it's apt to get hit by hurricanes.

And the other thing is that it's become greatly more developed

in the last three decades, right?

There are tens of thousands

of now hundreds of thousands of wealthy vacation homes along the coast of

the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida and they are very susceptible to hurricanes

that come up the Atlantic coast.

So to what extent I guess are, and I hate to think of things this way, but to what extent is the fact

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