Tree Damage Expense

If your risk of having a tree fall on your car is that it will happen once every 1,000 days and the cost of repairs is between $500 to $1,500, averaging $1,000, then your tree damage expense is going to be $1 per day over the long term if you pay for it yourself.

If you can not budget or plan ahead, you can pool your risk with other people. If you do that with a mutual company (in theory no profit) then your expense will have to include the cost of administrating the payments, say an additional 5%. If you use a for profit company then that profit is added on, say an additional 5%, so now your tree damage expense will be $1.10 per day.

If you are a person who wants something for nothing or likes illusions, you can demand that your employer pay your tree damage expense or provide insurance for it.  Assuming you have the power to get this, your employer will deduct that expense from what he would have paid you, add on his 2% cost of administration and your tree damage expense is now $1.12 per day.

Now if this industry is perceived as abusive or if there are folks that can't, won't or are unable to pay for their tree damage, we get a national federal program to deal with all the problems. If the government grants patents to all the paint suppliers, regulates and controls how the repairman operate, the cost of repairs triples. To pay for those who can't or won't pay the government imposes new tree damage taxes on the payrolls to the tune of 1.65% and other hidden taxes.  To make sure it can fund all of this additional cost of administration, the federal government imposes a penalty (tax) on those who self insure.

That folks is how your tree damage expense balloons from $1 per day to $5 per day even if you don't own a car or a tree.

I might add that all of this added expense has not improved your tree damage care. It is still the same, just cost five times as much.

Repeal!  If we repeal and replace, we have lost our free market system forever.