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Marco Rubio keeps ripping high insurance costs

The Senator from South Florida delivers increasingly familiar talking points. Even Florida’s Senior Senator isn’t immune from stratospheric costs of home and car insurance.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio continued to raise concerns in yet another below-the-radar interview this week. During a segment on “A Business Minute with Lily Lopez,” the third-term Republican from South Florida zeroed in on high prices in those sectors, noting that in South Florida “our car insurance is more expensive than anybody else’s, that the property insurance is more expensive than anybody else’s.”

This was part of a larger statement, in which the Senator also bemoaned the high price of homeownership amid an economy “changing very fast.” But Rubio’s concerns about auto and homeowners’ insurance have become a recurrent theme for those tracking the Senator closely.

During a Fox News interview on “The Faulkner Focus” last week, he again complained about the high cost of living, extending his gripes to the cost to insure an automobile in the Miami metro, which is as high as anywhere in the country.

South Florida ranks second in the nation with the biggest inflation problem

The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metropolitan area ranks second in the nation with the biggest inflation problem, according to a new report by Wallethub. The year-over-year national inflation rate rose 3.5% for March 2024, while the annual rate of inflation in the South Florida metropolitan area got to 4.90%.

Personal-finance website WalletHub decided to take a look at exactly how inflation has been impacting people across the U.S. -- and South Florida residents are among those being impacted the most. A total of 23 major MSAs -- Metropolitan Statistical Areas -- were compared across two key metrics involving the Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation.

Researchers noted Consumer Price Index for the latest month for which BLS data is available to two months prior and one year prior -- to get a snapshot of how inflation has changed in the short and long term, WalletHub stated.

WalletHub developed a score that measures both the inflation rate for the last year and the inflation for the last three months. Miami was tied with Dallas-Fort Worth with the highest Consumer Price Index change when it came to March versus one year prior -- at 4.90%.

Bright Lit Place: The people who fight for — and depend on — Everglades restoration.

Deep in the Everglades, in remote sawgrass marshes few people ever see, Michael Frank points to a faded white, red black and gold Miccosukee flag that flies above the dock at his family tree island.

“We were told to never, ever leave the Everglades. You leave the Everglades, you lose your culture, you lose your language, you lose your identity,” Frank said. “You become just like the outside people.”

Today, unnaturally high-water flows under the boardwalks that connect the island’s thatch-roofed chickees. Native plants fight for space with weedy elephant grass, Brazilian pepper and other invasive species. The flag stays up, Frank said, because it represents the Miccosukee Tribe’s willingness to talk with those outside people to help save the marshes that hold his ancestral tree islands.

The WLRN podcast Bright Lit Place, part of the Pulitzer Center’s Connected Coastlines reporting initiative, examines what happened to Florida’s promise to undo the damage killing the islands and restore the Everglades with a massive plan approved in 2000. Work was originally expected to cost just under $8 billion and take about 20 years. The price has now soared to $23 billion and fallen decades behind schedule. Meanwhile, the swamp keeps dying.

Pro-police laws signed by DeSantis cast a shadow on Florida’s open government tradition | Opinion

The second week of April began with the moon casting a shadow on the sun. It ended on Friday with Gov. Ron DeSantis casting a shadow on Florida’s tradition of open government.

DeSantis, who has been commendably supportive of law enforcement, did so by signing into law Senate Bill 184 and House Bill 601 that may erode public trust and have a detrimental impact on the agencies the bills were intended to help.

The House bill essentially prevents cities and counties from having their own independent police review boards. Instead, probes of alleged police misconduct would be handled by each jurisdiction’s state attorney and by the agencies’ own internal affairs units, possibly subject to review by boards appointed, respectively, by county sheriffs and/or municipal police chiefs.

While some of Florida’s existing police review boards have included unreasonable critics of the police, and while their proceedings could duplicate other investigations, they at least provided the public with a window into the workings of their local law enforcement agencies.