Daniel TilsonMillions of middle-class Floridians will have the opportunity this year to prove an important point to comfortably incumbent state legislators.
The point?
When members of the Florida Senate and House of Representatives distort or hide the truth about their achievements, motives, methods and goals, sufficient numbers of voters will be savvy enough to catch on and vote them out of office.
Wednesday’s introduction by Senate President Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, and House Speaker Will Weatherford, R-Wesley Chapel, of what they cleverly call “Work Plan Florida 2014” serves as reminder that the point has not yet been made, and desperately needs to be.
With the 60-day legislative session scheduled to start March 4, the “Work Plan” represents the Republican Party of Florida’s (RPOF) public policy and lawmaking agenda for 2014.
And a shell game by any other name would smell as fishy.
Gaetz, Weatherford and the other conservative Republicans controlling the House and Senate leave no doubt with this plan about how easily they think most voters can be fooled.
Gaetz framed it for reporters with the kind of overarching, overblown half-truth about Florida’s economic recovery that we’ll be hearing from RPOF candidates ad nauseam.
“The state of Florida has had a tremendous transformational turnaround in the last three years,” he said, pointing to the steady lowering of the unemployment rate.
The untold side of the story features inconvenient truths about how the bulk of new jobs are low-wage, no-benefits jobs, and about how workers’ average incomes keep going down while their benefits get reduced or cut.
Another untold truth is that the RPOF officials taking credit for new, bad jobs are the same ones who passed a law last year shutting workers stuck in those jobs out of a shot at higher wages and basic benefits, such as sick-leave days.
Then there are two ugly untold statistics directly attributable to RPOF policies and practices in recent years, as Florida currently ranks first nationally in foreclosures and second in uninsured citizens.
Kind of makes you question the “tremendous transformational turnaround” Gaetz was touting.
That wasn’t the only questionable framing he did Wednesday, adding this newly classic conservative cliché to the mix:
“I believe in the redistribution of opportunity.”
What that means is, conservative Republicans think they can manipulate middle-class voters into voting against their own interests by using the once-dirty “redistribution” word in new ways.
But when you take a good look at the new “Work Plan,” it’s easy to see through the double-talk, smokescreens and half-truth.
What you see is RPOF legislators once again prioritizing private special interests over and above those of working and retired constituents, while trying to pull the wool over the eyes of those constituents with framing tricks and empty clichés.
A few examples from “Work Plan Florida 2014”:
- What Gaetz calls a “broad based tax cut that will target low income and working Floridians” represents more than half of a $500 million cut going to corporations, the rest to saving drivers $12 a year on auto fees.
- It renews Weatherford’s push to keep state workers out of the Florida Retirement System, forcing them into risky private investments — an anti-middle-class scheme Gaetz claims creates “more options for making retirement for Floridians secure.”
- “Expand Education Choices for Families In Poverty” is the frame-game-name given to diverting unspecified millions more dollars from Florida’s public schools into charter schools run by private, for-profit corporations with ties to RPOF legislators.
With a “Work Plan” like this from our Republican friends in the Legislature, who amongst their working and retired middle-class constituents needs enemies?
Time to make a point.
