CA FIRES. GET READY FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO RIP YOU OFF

Damage estimates are as bogus as an LA Times news story and exist only to get money to state bureaucrats from Federal Treasury (you). Let us suppose that 3,000 homes are destroyed. All covered for 100% replacement cost by insurance. Let us assume each house is 3,000 square feet, a rather large house by most standards. At $100 per square foot to rebuild it's $300,000; at $200 it's $600,000. So let's say $600,000 times 3,000 homes. That comes to a tidy one billion eight hundred million, But 3,000 three thousand square foot homes have not been lost. And it doesn't cost $200 per square foot to rebuild. The land is still there, it hasn't been lost. So these loony Left government aparatchiks are claiming damage to trees, bushes, and animals in an effort to get Uncle Sucker to cough up the bucks. Losses that have to be paid by the taxpayers would include all the time of the firefighters, the expenses of the equipment, and the reseeding expenses of the woods. There is some road damage too. BOTTOM LINE: Don't for a second accept the damage estimates that include the inflated raw land values in California or homes that are fully covered for replacement cost. Cost to taxpayers can't possibly be more than $30 to $40 mil.