Daniel Tilson“So this state is on a roll.”
That was Gov. Rick Scott’s deceptively simple summation, after rattling off the same old self-serving economic and employment numbers in his final debate against Charlie Crist.
Scott’s incessant TV ads highlight the same misleading numbers, comparing job losses under former Gov. Crist, vs. gains under Scott.
But neither his ads nor the governor himself offer any explanations why, while adding hundreds of thousands of new jobs, average middle-class wages and household incomes for most Floridians have gone down or stayed flat for years now.
There’s no mention, much less explanation, of how with all those new jobs, plus rolled-back regulations and tax cuts for big business, Florida continues to rank at or near the bottom nationally in so many categories of economic well being.
After nearly four years of Scott working with an equally conservative and almost completely cooperative Republican-dominated state Legislature to make Florida more “business-friendly” for “job creators,” this is where Florida stands in 2014:
- Worst foreclosure rate in the USA.
- Second-most unfair tax system in the nation, unfair to lower and middle-income people
- Second-worst poverty rate in America.
- Fourth worst rate of uninsured.
- Fifth worst level of income inequality.
- Eighth worst level of support services for the elderly, disabled and their caregivers.
- Ninth worst level of teachers’ salaries.
- Worst decline in per-student educational spending from 2008-2013.
Seeing a list like that makes it easy to understand why the governor and his re-election campaign rely so heavily on comparing job losses under Crist to job gains under Scott.
Who’d want to run for re-election on those other numbers?
Not Gov. Scott, nor all those Republican state senators and representatives who helped him chalk up all such awful, anti-middle-class statistics.
So, they run on job loss vs. growth numbers, pretending their business-first policies put our state “on a roll.”
Well, they can run on that if they want, but they can’t hide from it.
The truth is this.
The vast majority of jobs lost under Gov. Crist were due to the national recession, the housing crash and Florida’s vulnerability to both.
Then-Republican Crist bucked his party by taking nonpartisan action and embracing the Democratic stimulus package that saved tens of thousands of jobs, while the increasingly hyper-partisan, Republican-run Legislature made bold action by him at the state level impossible.
The large majority of jobs gained since, under Scott, were gained because he and Republican legislators put all their economic development eggs in the baskets of big corporations such as Disney, Darden Restaurants, Carnival Cruise Lines and others.
Instead of launching new job training, infrastructure-rebuilding and clean energy initiatives to generate better jobs, wages, benefits and incomes for working people, Scott & Co. went the opposite way.
They blocked a statewide minimum wage hike, and passed a law preventing counties and cities from raising it; or from requiring health coverage, limited paid sick leave, or anything else to help keep working families out of poverty.
They knowingly swelled the ranks of the working poor, while providing big corporations a growing pool of desperate workers.
They left it up to the middle class to pay for the public assistance new jobholders needed to support their families.
So, I’m thinking that when Gov. Scott talked about Florida being “on a roll,” a voice inside his head was singing James Taylor’s classic, “Steamroller Blues.”
“Well, I’m a steamroller, baby, I’m bound to roll all over you.”
The only way now to cure our “bad case of steamroller blues” is to vote for Charlie Crist and other Democrats committed to getting this runaway train of a rigged economy back on track.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
