Rich governor, poor government

MIAMI – Florida has one of the richest governors and one of the poorest governments in the nation.

Rick Scott’s net worth increased by $83 million last year, bringing his declared total net worth to a cool $232 million (his real net worth is likely higher because some of his assets are under his wife’s name).

Scott’s astonishing wealth contrasts starkly with the poor government over which he presides. Florida’s government is poor in two ways, bad governance and miserliness. Bad governance: In Florida we have a state that is: (a) frequently hit by devastating hurricanes; (b) subject to frequent storm-related power blackouts (Florida Power & Light has chosen not to make the investment to convert to a more resilient underground transmission infrastructure); (c) dependent on air conditioning because of high and rising temperatures; (d) with a huge elderly population for whom staying cool can be a life-or-death issue.

A responsible government with a regard for human life long ago would have required nursing homes to maintain electrical generators capable of running air conditioners and powering medical equipment. Yet it took a tragedy that claimed the lives of over a dozen people last year in a nursing home in Hollywood following Hurricane Irma before the state legislature finally got around to requiring nursing homes to have generators. No accident: State government has been aware for years of the potential for disaster. In the recent past, lawmakers rejected legislation that would have prevented it. This is just one of many instances in which the state has shown poor governance and a shocking disregard for human life.

The second way government in Florida is poor is that it doesn’t ever have enough money. Or, that is how it appears. In fact, the state has the money if it wants it. The pretense of penury is useful for the Republican goal of squeezing social programs until they implode. The pretense of penury is made plausible because the absence of a state income tax and decades of cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, in fact, mean the state never has the money to spend on the vital needs of its citizens. Nor does it want to have the necessary funds. State government is poor by choice, the choice to impose minimal taxes on those who can pay and to provide the bare minimum of services to those who need them. It is a choice based on class. Florida practices a preferential option for the well-off.

One of many adverse consequences of this choice is that the state with the $232 million governor ranks 43 among the 50 states in per pupil spending in public education. That’s disgraceful by design. Moreover, if the state neglects the education of its children who are its future, imagine what it does to other people, especially those that this society disparages as non-deserving, including the poor, the unemployed, those hurt on the job, the medically uninsured, the mentally ill, and incarcerated children and adults.

But, we don’t have to imagine anything. The mean-spiritedness and the miserliness of this state toward those groups has been richly documented by the press, academic researchers and advocates. The horror stories abound. Children lost in the “child welfare” system because the state does not spend enough to have a sufficient number of social workers and far less than needed to attract and keep qualified professionals. People under the custody of the prison or juvenile justice system tortured and killed with impunity by guards. The state pays so little and offers such poor working conditions to correctional officers only the desperate and the sadists can find the job attractive.

This state cares so little for the needs of people who cannot afford the whopping cost of private health insurance that it turned down FREE federal money for expanding Medicaid under Obamacare. Why would anybody turn down free money that would have provided health care for many people and giving a boost to the economy to boot?

It isn’t easy to understand it from outside the GOP ideological bubble, but there is a method to the Republicans’ madness and calculation to their cruelty. The Republicans wanted to destroy Obamacare and that would make the money used for expanding Medicaid go away. But, by that time, those who had been benefitting from the expansion of Medicaid would have an expectation of continuing to get health care. Republicans hate it when people begin to feel entitled to things that are taken for granted by people in truly civilized countries, like free health care. An entitlement is to a Republican what a cross is to a vampire. And Republicans would really hate it if, after attaining their dream of abolishing Obamacare, people back home put pressure on the state to make up for the shortfall the GOP itself created. 

This kind of thinking is so perverse it needs explaining. A complete analysis would take me back to Calvin and the myth of the frontier and of self-reliance. It would fill volumes. But here is where the $232 million man provides me a neat shortcut. Can Rick Scott and the other ultra-rich Republicans, who are the real core of the GOP, put themselves in the shoes of, much less feel empathy or show solidarity with, the children of a lesser god, namely almost all the rest of us?

The policies of the plutocrat that governs this state, and those of the plutocrat running this nation into the ground provide a clear answer.