The sorry state of Florida

Ripped from the headlines:

“Facing funding cuts for the uninsured, lawmakers say they have no Plan B.” (Miami Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau)

“Jobs chief grilled over treatment of state’s jobless.” (Tampa Bay Times)

“State silent on children’s health insurance.” (Miami Herald)

“Scott’s push for more tax cuts, jobs is met with tepid response.” (Miami Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau)

“Firm says Gov. Scott’s stake in pipeline project is ‘irrelevant’.”

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These are a few of dozens of headlines that have appeared in Florida in recent weeks. They make one thing abundantly clear. The moral and ethical state of the Sunshine State today is dim.

According to the teachings of the great moral leaders in history–from the man from Nazareth himself all the way to Pope Francis, and including Buddha, José Martί, and many others–a person, an institution, or a government should be judged by the way it treats the lowest-ranking member of the socioeconomic pyramid.

By this yardstick, and in light of the headlines cited above, the moral/ethical state of Florida can be boiled down to one word: abominable.

The headlines alone make the case, but digging deeper and engaging in just a bit of political archeology can help flesh things out and connect the dots.

Let’s start with Gov. Scott’s “push for more tax cuts.” Florida is “projected to have at least $635 million more in revenue next year.” So why do lawmakers say they have no Plan B to “fund healthcare for the poorest Floridians…” despite the fact they know that “the pot of money set aside” for these needy fellow citizens “is expected to shrink dramatically next year”?

The reason is that the health care needs of this unfortunate but sizable number of Floridians never mattered a whit to the Republican legislators who have been in control of the body for decades. If they had cared, they would have accepted the Medicaid expansion program offered under Obamacare, which would have provided the state every cent needed to take care of the uninsured. The fact that they rejected this windfall, which incidentally would have supported more jobs than Scott’s proposed tax gifts to big corporations, speaks volumes.

Toeing the Republican ideology that holds that federal dollars per se are evil, and in the spirit of spiting Obama no matter the cost, they had no qualms when it came to throwing the medically needy under a bus.

Now, despite the fact there will be enough state tax dollars next year to take care of the problem created by the state’s perverse aversion to Medicaid expansion, lawmakers and the governor have other plans for the money. Scott wanted $635 million in tax cuts for corporations to persuade them to move to Florida. Even his fellow Republicans thought that was a little rich and gave him “only” $427 million.

Such tax incentives have been shown by numerous studies to be ineffective. The Googles of this world don’t want to locate to states that underfund education and health care. Sick workers don’t show up every day. Poorly educated one’s don’t perform. It’s bad business and worse corporate social responsibility. What cutting-edge business needs that kind of reputation?

Some corporations do shop around for states willing to shift dollars from human needs to corporate welfare. But they create few well-paying jobs and they are gone as soon as another state cuts them an even better deal. Thus corporate tax incentives don’t create any jobs at the aggregate, national level. They just shift them from place to place. It’s a great deal for companies who can play one state against another, but for workers it’s a bum deal amounting to a race to the bottom on wages and benefits as well as for citizens in need of help from the state, often for their very survival.

The other headlines and the accompanying stories further illustrate how our state’s government plays by its own denatured version of the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold rules.” The state’s system for processing unemployment applications is so screwed up that few of the jobless ever get to collect the full benefits to which they are entitled. The head of the state’s unemployment system, however, is less interested in fixing this big problem than in creating a police force to crack down on abuses! Who can abuse a system that you can’t even use?

You might suspect that the cumbersome application system and the threat of enforcement by a special police force are both deliberately calculated so the state has to pay the jobless as little money as possible. That might be called cynical. But the state holds the title on cynicism, and it’s a good bet that your suspicions are on target.

I could go on for days. The state wants to scrutinize the hapless unemployed person trying to navigate a rigged process in order to collect meager sums but the governor’s economic interest in a big business deal, a pipeline project involving state government, is “irrelevant”? How convenient.

Major human rights organization want an investigation of deaths and other abuses in the state’s juvenile and adult incarceration systems? That, I guess, is irrelevant too.

On his trip to the United States, Pope Francis, following the example of the founder of Christianity, washed the feet of incarcerated criminals. In this state, the powers that be, from the governor on down, are more interested in kissing the rear end of the well-born and the wealthy.