The recent fires in California have brought to light the problems associated with living in an area ripe for natural disaster. Millions of Americans tempt the fates by putting their property and even their lives on the line by choosing to live where they do. They possess indifference - ignorance, perhaps - to the West’s fires and earthquakes, the Mississippi Basin’s floods, the East/Gulf Coasts’ hurricanes, and the Midwest’s tornadoes. When disaster does strike, which is often, they seem shocked that Mother Nature could assault them as she has.

On the other hand, we who live elsewhere fully understand the dangers they willingly took on. That’s a big reason why we’ve selected snowdrifts over mudslides. A minor inconvenience is much more welcomed than a major disaster.

So, if we know better while they don’t, why should we be their economic salvation? In almost every measurable natural disaster we end up footing the bill for their self-inflicted misery, paying federal taxes that go towards either, one, rectifying the damaged infrastructure in these highly-populated disaster areas, or, two, investing in the rebuilding of their homes and communities at the financial level at which insurance companies were intelligent enough not to commit.

Ignoring our sizable investment in our own insurance (therefore, further downstream: their’s), our input to federal payments alone is unfathomable. Some samples of disaster-driven aid, just from one single storm (Hurricane Katrina), are: $2.5 billion to remove debris from Louisiana and Mississippi, $10 billion to help the homeowners in those states, and, the piece de resistance, $100 billion in federal relief spending for Katrina-ravaged areas. That’s $112.5 billion for one disaster, a disaster the impact of which was magnified by people choosing to live along the hurricane-happy Gulf or below sea level in a coastal city (New Orleans).

How much do the countless, less-reported disasters that befall the United States every year cost us? It’s almost impossible to track because so many different scenarios exist or have the potential to exist. The government cannot adequately budget for Nature because she does what she wants, when she wants. Just look at Tornado Alley. It is home to 1,000 tornadoes annually. Statistics show 20 of those can be expected to be "violent" (F3 and above). That doesn’t mean those 20 will occur every year. In one year there may be one F3 storm, but in the next there may be 40. But, anyway you cut it there are still hundreds of tornadoes every year, big and small.

Now, if people - generations of them, no less – don’t learn from their mistakes and continue to live in an area where a decent statistical probability exists that their house may be leveled by a tremor or a gust of wind, why should others contribute financially because of the afflicted peoples’ lack of Darwinian survival skills? Because of their ill-advised life choices, the federal government (read "we") in 2004, for example, had to bail out disaster victims to the tune of $2.25 billion while giving their states and local governments another $1.15 billion.

The government has essentially become another method of insurance for these individuals. It pays for losses that they would otherwise be unable to recoup. Therefore, it should make sense that their obligation to (not from) the government be treated with an insurance mindset as well. Rather than paying federal tax rates identical to those paid by individuals living in relatively safe areas (New York, Vermont, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, etc) people living in known disaster areas should pay a higher tax rate (a "higher premium" per se) in order to cover the probability of a property-damaging catastrophe. If they expect money to magically appear when needed as it does now, they should invest in that "rainy day" fund.

Residing in certain locales comes with defined economic risk, one the specific population of that area should be prepared to assume. A high-risk/high-tax approach to aid and relief is the only fair approach. The current methods reward continued bad behavior and are quite unfair. We will see that in all its harsh reality in the coming months: the taxes paid by Western New Yorkers who live in a naturally-safe environment in their $80,000 homes will pay for the rebuilding of the expensive homes of the residents of Los Angeles County, California, a place where the average home sells for $525,000 and a place in which the homeowners chose to be, even while knowing the potential for danger.