‘Floridians want to work’: Gov. DeSantis breaks with Senators

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Gov. Ron DeSantis did not agree with Florida’s two United States Senators about whether attractive unemployment benefits made people less likely to work.

“Floridians want to work,” DeSantis said Friday in Jacksonville. “I think people want to work. People enjoy being out, doing things that are productive.”

“Part of it is that’s just kind of how they are,” the Governor added.

“We’ve got a lot of hard working people here. They absolutely want to work. They did not want to have their jobs taken from them. We’re going to get them back,” DeSantis said.

In making these statements, DeSantis distanced himself from a school of thought, advocated by Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, that federal unemployment benefits disincentivized returning to work.

On a Wednesday appearance on Fox and Friends, Florida’s senior Senator fretted about overly attractive jobless benefits hampering the economic recovery.

“A lot of people are having trouble re-hiring workers because the workers are saying to them ‘I’m making more on unemployment,’” Rubio said. “Not everybody, most people would prefer to have a job obviously, but that’s an issue we’re hearing reports about.”

When asked, Rubio’s communications staff would not assign an actual numeric value to what “most” means, instead saying that many businesses are complaining that federal payments are more than what they pay.

Rubio followed Sen. Rick Scott‘s lead in questioning whether some rendered jobless because of the pandemic and associated economic restrictions are disincentivized to get back to work.

“If given the chance to make more on a government program than in a job, some will make the rational and reasonable decision to delay going back to work, hampering our economic recovery,” Scott, a Naples Republican and former Florida Governor, tweeted Tuesday.

DeSantis also touched on “fixing a very broken system that you had with unemployment” in the state, an inheritance from the Rick Scott administration.

The Governor reiterated an earlier suggestion that there would be an investigation of how the CONNECT website was, as he’d said previously, “designed to fail.”

“You go back four weeks, the system was in tatters. People couldn’t even get on. There’s a whole investigation that’s going to need to go on about how Florida paid $77 million” for the website,” DeSantis said.

“The system had a lot of problems. It couldn’t hold up. It got overwhelmed. I had to bring in engineers to effectively rebuild it,” he said.