From NOAA to 2024, and guesstimate for January 2025:
Notes: Month-by-month accumulation of estimated costs of each year’s billion-dollar disasters, with colored lines showing 2024 (red) and the other top-10 costliest years; figures are in 2024$. Other years are light gray. 2024 finished the year in fourth place for annual costs. Screenshot from the NOAA NCEI Billion-dollar Disasters. Purple diamond is estimate for LA fires, by author. Source: NOAA accessed 1/12/2025. January 2025 ytd based on estimates $135 to $150 bn current dollars (AP 1/11/2025).
Addendum: Count data (same source):
Antoni will claim this is a sign that FEMA funds are way too high.
Off topic – preserving democracy, or not:
We receive assurances from “moderates” that Donald Trump does not represent a special threat to democracy, that our system has withstood anti-democratic efforts in the past, and will do so again. Nothing to see here, move along. Go back to ESPN. Go back to sleep.
To which I say, first they came for the whistle blowers, but I am not a whistle blower, so I did nothing. Then, they came for the election workers…immigrants…teachers…
Think I’m just a hand-wringing leftie? Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joe Wright are the authors of “The Origins of Elected Strongmen”, a new book which looks at recent deterioration of support for democracy. Here’s the blurb:
“Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d’état or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader’s career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, The Origins of Elected Strongmen shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy.
“Personalist parties lack both the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader’s efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters’ commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.”
The authors have an article at Politico, for those interested in a shorter take:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/12/republicans-save-democracy-trump-00197613