The U.S. Senate will soon consider legislation to revamp the federal flood-insurance program. The program as currently constructed has been an environmental and fiscal disaster, subsidizing with taxpayer dollars building and rebuilding in coastal places prone to hurricanes and other storms.

To no small degree, the program has been an income transfer from middle-class people inland to rich folks with second homes on beaches, providing the latter with insurance at far below market values. And the minimal construction rules that go with getting this coverage have often been ignored — especially by politically powerful developers.

Legislation now being considered would raise deductibles and premiums for federal flood insurance coverage — good ideas in themselves.

But it would also require more people to buy flood insurance. And senators from Mississippi and Louisiana, representing coastal-property owners whose structures are destroyed every few decades by hurricanes and then rebuilt with help from the taxpayers, want wind insurance added. Thus the cost of the program would explode.

It’s yet another example of how little some legislators think about federal financial integrity.

The fact is that environmental prudence would dictate a removal of incentives to build in flood-prone areas, and that includes such things as federal loans and reinsurance subsidies for state disaster funds.

The government should shrink, and ultimately phase out, the program, which has also long proven vulnerable to the stratagems of fraud artists and is now $17 billion in debt. Let people get what insurance they can get from private insurers without federal subsidy. If they can’t get coverage for houses or other buildings in certain areas because of the high cost, or unavailability, of insurance stemming from standard, actuarial risk analysis, then they probably shouldn’t be there.

It’s time that taxpayers without an ocean view get some relief.