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It’s Official, Your Car Insurance Costs Are Going To Continue To Skyrocket

Alice Roden
It's Official, Your Car Insurance Costs Are Going To Continue To Skyrocket


This is an issue near and dear to my heart because right now (and for some time) I’m getting reamed in the car insurance area. The reason that this is cruel and unusual punishment is because I am in the class of drivers that are the complete least risk on the road. I have no tickets, no accidents, not even a parking ticket, and I barely drive anymore because I work from home. I even get groceries delivered, which cuts down a lot on my driving. I drove maybe a thousand miles this year, if not less. So WHY am I paying for car insurance through the nose? Because of Trump, what else?

I have had numerous conversations with the insurance company (and I use the cheapest one out there, G.E.I.C.O.) and nobody is leveling with me about the plain fact of the matter being that I drive a Japanese import. I’m sure a lot of you do as well. If so, you’re going to be in the same boat with me, safe driver ratings up one side and down the other, no accidents, low mileage — but your rates will still go up. Because Trump did the tariffs and so the parts for a Honda (which is what I drive) have gone up.

Check your local car mechanic, s/he’ll tell you that car parts have gone up insanely and so the cost of repair goes up and there’s nothing to be done. It must be cut off at the source. Trump goes on to rant about how great his tariffs are:

I’m one of the fools who needs to try to decide how to deal with a Catch-22 dilemma. I have a car downstairs and I have to decide if I can still afford full coverage on it. It’s in a garage, which is the good news. But the bad news is that said garage got broken into on Halloween night three years ago. Nothing was taken (because there’s nothing to take other than a pillow and an old TV screen Murfster gave to me years ago) but the burglars could have taken the entire car, or they could have stolen the catalytic converter and other parts, had they wanted to.

So I live with this quandary: Do I pay through the nose for insurance or do I go with liability only and that means if I’m vandalized or robbed of the car, then I just eat the loss. And I’m not in a position to eat that kind of a loss. I don’t have cash sitting in the bank to replace the car.

But I MIGHT have cash in the bank to replace the car if I go liability only and bank the savings. So it becomes a roll of the dice. And I’m not somebody that likes to gamble. That’s why I have full coverage in the first place, because then if it’s a fender bender, or hail, or theft, I just make a phone call and checks start getting cut and that’s how I like it.

But that’s not how it is right now. And let me depress you further: ALL insurance is going up now. Renters insurance has gone up, so has homeowners. My renter’s insurance has tripled in the past five years, you believe that? Tripled. You should have heard the customer service rep stammer and cough trying to come up with a way to explain that.

The explanation is complex but basically the fact that climate change has been ignored for so long has contributed to insane weather conditions, which have contributed to hurricanes, brush fires and the like. Recently in California homeowners’ insurance has gone up as much as 20%, even if you’re a homeowner that has never made a claim, or not in the past twenty years or so.

This is simply the new normal. We are screwed. Unless you’re in an economic bracket where you’re used to paying huge amounts for car parts because you drive a Mercedes, you’re going to be finding out what the owners of those cars find out. But usually they have the cash for repairs. I have known some pretentious people who drive a hot car that they really can’t afford in order to impress people and they sweat blood when it comes to paying a repair bill, but for the most part the fancy foreign car crowd can pay the freight for repairs on their German imports.

Those of us who drive Japanese imports were in a different class. Now we’re not anymore.

Get ready for another insurance hike. And tariffs will not fix the problem, tariffs are the problem. And this is going to bite the GOP in the ass one year from now. All dreams of a white supremacy Xian theocracy to the side, we all need to be able to pay for our cars and right now Trump is crippling that basic need, regardless of whatever other sociological foolishness he may be enabling or in favor of enabling.

This is what Democratic messaging needs to be, screamed at air raid siren levels. INSURANCE! YOU’RE GETTING KILLED ON CAR INSURANCE BECAUSE OF STUPID TARIFFS!! And this is what Republicans need to fix, or see their seats in Congress go bye bye.

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