Ride Free

LinkedIn News posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on the increase in uninsured drivers, and how that is raising rates for remaining ratepayers. The demands for a crackdown on the uninsured were swift. Hoping to make the case that the situation wasn't as cut and dried as it may have seemed, one person offered up the following scenario:

A mom is raising two kids and inflation has been insane. Mom is educated, works hard and wants her kids to be able to enjoy life. Mom has cut back on everything SHE possibly can. She traded her car in for the least expensive car possible, she hasn't bought herself anything in ages. She has even taken on a side gig to supplement her income, but she just can't make "ends meat". So when it comes down to either being able to put food on the table or paying the high insurance bill, she lets one month pass, and then it comes the next month and it is double. There is no way she can afford that either. And then it lapses.

Now I am not an idiot - that is not every story by far. There are many idiots out there who we (including myself) are paying for, but not everyone is in that category. There are many families truly struggling. It isn't so black and white.

As an aside, part of me is curious why people always trot out impoverished mothers for these sorts of stories. There's nothing about this that precludes the hardworking parent being a father. But I suspect that the expectation that men should be able to pay their expenses, regardless of the circumstances, was at play here. I also thought that it was interesting that other people who weren't paying for their insurance were "idiots." Maybe it was simply shorter than "freeloaders."

In any event, intentionally or not, the commenter was making a case for an informal safety net, one that allowed the hypothetical cash-strapped mother to continue driving, in the absence of a formal safety net that had reached the conclusion that person mobility should be treated as a right, rather than a privilege. Now, given the fact that many people are feeling the pinch of prices being higher than they remember from the time immediately prior to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic, it's a safe bet that formally expanding government programs to pay the auto insurance premiums for low-income people is a non-starter. Especially given the fact that having access to a motor vehicle is widely regarded as a privilege.

People in the United States tend to be sensitive to costs, despite living in the largest economy in the world and enjoying a very high per-capita GNP, because wealth inequality tends to make people highly (and some might say overly) aware of their own relative poverty and precarity. It's part of what made Donald Trump President of the United States. Had more people been convinced that the broader economy was working for them, he wouldn't even have a viable candidate. And while many people on the political Left seem to be unable to wrap their brains around the appeal of Trumpist authoritarianism, the simple fact of the matter is that there is a widespread understanding that democracy fails to deliver the goods because it allows for too much corruption and flat-out wrongdoing within government. And too much looking the other way, when people do things that benefit themselves at public expense.

The debate over uninsured drivers, and which ones ma or may not be deserving of sympathy and understanding, is a microcosm of that broader sentiment. The public's impression of how good the economy is, and what kind of job that governments are doing is not driven by facts, but by feelings. The Wall Street Journal understands this; framing the article as uninsured motorists getting a free ride at other's expense may as well have been deliberately calibrated to remind people of their own feelings of being financially straited.

I'm terrible at predicting the future, and so I've stopped trying. But it doesn't require a crystal ball to understand that unless the next administration takes concrete steps to improve the public's sense of well-being, resentments are going to continue to grow.