Politics & Power Quote by Gary Miller

A politician’s brag-sheet dressed up as a public-service bulletin, Gary Miller’s numbers do the heavy lifting here. The intent is to reassure and to justify: the National Flood Insurance Program isn’t some niche bureaucracy, it’s massive, normalized, and embedded in everyday American life. “20,000 communities” signals legitimacy through breadth; “90 insurance companies” signals private-sector buy-in; “four million policies” and “$800 billion” land like a closing argument for why the program must be maintained, expanded, or defended against critics.

The subtext is quieter and sharper: flood risk has been converted into a nationwide financial product, and that conversion is being sold as competence. When Miller stacks statistics this way, he’s not just describing coverage; he’s laundering anxiety into scale. If millions are enrolled and hundreds of billions are insured, then the threat must be real enough to warrant institutional permanence, and the institution must be responsible enough to trust. It’s governance by spreadsheet, where magnitude substitutes for moral clarity.

Context matters because flood insurance is never only about weather. It’s about where Americans build, what gets subsidized, and who pays when the water comes. The NFIP has long been criticized for encouraging development in risky areas and for recurrent-loss properties that drain public funds. Miller’s framing avoids the messy distributional questions (coastal affluence vs. inland taxpayers, climate change vs. local zoning) and steers the listener toward a single takeaway: look how big this is. Big, in politics, is often a proxy for “too important to question.”