The New York Times reports that Florida Republicans are "at odds with their leader", Gov. Rick Scott who applied $73 million of his own fortune to win the Governor's Mansion in last November's election. But it is misleading to take away from the headline that what will emerge from this year's legislature is "less bad" than if Gov. Scott had supreme power to make laws. Fact: this Republican legislature is the most conservative in 100 years. There is not an empathetic bone in Tallahassee, nor apparently a Democratic voice to articulate why there should be one.
The arguments of economists like Paul Krugman-- that at a time of major instability in the US economy, deficit spending could prevent another collapse-- have no support with Republicans or even amongst Democrats shell-shocked in the November elections. Meanwhile, the Legislature has taken an axe to the regulatory programs that protected, or at least intended to protect, Florida's quality of life and environment. It's a "Fire Sale: Everything Must Go."
It is not a stretch to understand that the same crew, thanks to Grover Norquist, that aimed to shrink the size of government so it could be drowned in a bathtub is also inclined to throw out whatever babies are in the dirty bathtub water. Its supporters are pro-life, too, but against environmental rules that would protect life and God's creation. They are standing up with Fox News to elect public officials who support killing regulations in order to create jobs, but unwilling to learn for themselves how the entire apparatus is vapid, weak and misleading on purpose.
Here's from today's news:
• Lower-wage industries -- things like retail and food preparation -- accounted for 23 percent of the jobs lost during the recession, but 49 percent of the jobs gained over the last year, a recent study (pdf) by the National Employment Law Program found. Higher-wage industries, by contrast, accounted for 40 percent of the jobs lost, but just 14 percent of the jobs gained. In other words, low paying jobs are increasing as a percentage of total jobs, while high-paying jobs are on the decline.
• Meanwhile, the percentage of those working who have part-time jobs and want full-time ones surged in mid-February to 19.6 percent -- almost as high as it was a year ago before the recovery began, according to Gallup numbers. That suggests, of course, that a large number of the new jobs created over the last year are part-time.
• And a recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that even though productivity rose 5.2 percent from mid 2009 to the end of 2010, wages increased by just 0.3 percent. That means only 6 percent of productivity gains were shared with workers. In past recoveries, that figure has averaged 58 percent. This time around, far more of the gains went to shareholders, in the form of profits, which are at record levels.
Floridians might be lulled into believing that the Legislature is not as mean-spirited as Gov. Scott, who has approached governing with the zeal of entrepreneur who believes a firm business-like approach can cut through government inefficiency like a surgical knife. But Gov. Scott is not out to fix government policies designed to fail taxpayers and the public. How could he be? His own fortune was made by exploiting inefficiencies in medical procedure reimbursements by government. In other words, it is NOT that government can't work. Government that doesn't work is just too profitable to be given up for government that does.
Floridians might be lulled into believing that the Legislature will pull back from the most radical aspects of legislative proposals that are likely to emerge from committees. That is wishful thinking. This legislature is dominated by special interests who have seized the economic crisis as the greatest opportunity in generations, to eliminate regulations. In the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Zac Anderson reports on the large surge of cash that flowed into Tallahassee in the weeks and months leading into today’s first day of the 2011 Legislative Session. Anderson writes that $8.8 million flooded into the two political parties during the last two months of 2010, with the overwhelming amount ($7.7 million) going to the Republican Party of Florida. (This imbalance, by the way, is also reflected in contributions to independent expenditure committees at the national level.)
The main goal of the GOP radical extremists, supported by the Tea Party, is to take land use regulations and throw them into the crapper. The blood lust to do away with protections like the Urban Development Boundary in Miami-Dade is just too powerful. And why not? The speculators in land outside the UDB are at risk of losing everything to banks under pressure, five years later, to book debts at realistic, current values. All the speculators, if land use regulations are done away with, can re-rig local zoning in order to make their debts, marketable. Environmental protections and water management? Give them to the level of government most likely to loot the storehouse. Florida's Republican leaders don't really believe that "regulations killed jobs". They just know that to say so, plays well with the red-meat mob. As to a hint of a remorse that their own actions lubricated the velocity of the worst economic crash since the Depression? That would be their audacity of nope. The bottom line: the baseline for what constitutes fair and reasonable government has pushed so far off off the map as to be unrecognizable. That is the State of Florida today.
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