Editors Note

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of Troy's King Priam who caught the eye of the god Apollo. Bewitched by her beauty, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but once spurned, he added a curse that made it so no one believed her warnings. So much for “bewaring Greeks bearing gifts,” and so enters the Trojan Horse, city burns, Aeneas sails off, founds Rome — trinkets and postcards available — which eventually leads to a democratic presidential primary delegate process that makes the setting of insurance rates seem as easy as Joe Lunchbucket calculating how much it will cost to replace your roof on the back of an envelope using a pencil.

Which brings us to Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink's proposal to roll back the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund's single storm season obligation of $28 billion by $3 billion. When Governor Charlie Crist and the legislature last year were looking for a way to cut homeowners' rates, they simply added to the Cat Fund's $16 billion in annual reimbursement by another $12 billion. But in so doing, lawmakers took a fund with only $2 billion in cash and made it a paper tiger. Would the capital market even consider purchasing $25 billion in bonds? Or could Floridians pay hundreds of dollars in assessments over decades? They were inconvenient questions for a government that was determined to lower rates regardless of the future financial costs of the decision.

All true gamblers know that the odds are stacked in favor of the house. That is why in Las Vegas the food is cheap, the drinks and rooms complimentary, and the pit bosses make it their business to know the high rollers on a first-name basis. The slogan “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” refers first and foremost to your money. When it comes to Florida and hurricanes, the “house” is not the homes and buildings along the coastline, premium rates, Citizens, or the Cat Fund. It is the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. And while a couple of years without any major storms may lead to a higher stack of chips and greater confidence in your gambling skills, at some point all of that money ends up in the middle of the table and you can only look on helplessly as your full house is beaten by a straight flush.

That is when the Cassandra complex comes back to haunt. You can hear the whispered warnings of danger, the unavoidable and inevitable hurricanes, and the billions of dollars that will have to be raised to pay off the claims. But making those warnings heard and instilling them with a sense of reality that doesn't depend on the stark pictures of destroyed homes and ruined lives has always been a daunting — and often futile — task.

That is where Sink deserves credit for her Cat Fund plan. By proposing to roll back some of the fund's inflated $28 billion obligation that strains credulity, she is attempting to inject a sense of reality into the homeowners' insurance market. She is trying to convey to the legislature that this is real money with real consequences. And even if subtracting $3 billion from the fund means a minor raise in premiums — a debatable point — those premium increases pale in comparison to the millions that homeowners would have to shell out in annual assessments that could last decades.

Sink understands what all good gamblers do; you can't lose what you don't put in the middle of the table, and when you're bucking the house's odds, it's time to put some of the risk back in your wallet for another day. For that reason alone, Sink's plan shows a willingness to exercise some political courage that deserves to be supported. The question now is whether the legislature will heed Cassandra's warning.