Hullabaloo
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Making Things Worse
by digby
Who could have ever imagined that electing a criminal tea partier to the highest office in the state would cause problems?
Rick Scott, the conservative Republican billionaire who plucked the governor’s job from the party establishment in November with $73 million of his own money and the backing of the Tea Party, vowed during his campaign to run the troubled state like a corporate chief executive (which he was) and not a politician (which he proudly says he is not).
And now it has become a problem, some of his fellow Republicans say.
“The governor doesn’t understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government,” said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. “They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government.”
Republican lawmakers in Florida were hoping for a smoother transition. Instead, they say, they got top-down management from a political novice.
With the Legislature convening on Tuesday for a potentially arduous two-month session that is bound to usher in major cuts in spending and jobs and radical changes to education, pensions, unemployment benefits and Medicaid, the governor will be tested on a broader, more public scale. Florida faces an estimated $3.6 billion budget shortfall this year and has a stubborn 12 percent unemployment rate.
“I think there have been some understandable growing pains because government doesn’t function like a corporation,” said Speaker Dean Cannon, a Republican from central Florida, taking a more measured tone than Mr. Fasano.
Read the whole article. Basically, he believes that he is now a monarch and can do anything he wants without any input from the other electe4d leaders. And here's a little taste of what he plans to do:
Mr. Scott is single-minded in his plans to shake up Florida and create jobs. He wants to create a business-friendly environment, chop up the bureaucracy, peel away regulations and hand out $1.7 billion in tax cuts for corporations and property owners in the first year of his budget. Privatizing Medicaid and prisons is also high on the agenda.
In his budget proposal, Mr. Scott is seeking to eliminate more than 8,500 state jobs, including in the Corrections and Health Departments. His budget for the state’s already lean public schools is $1.75 billion less than this year’s, mostly because federal stimulus money dried up.
And he wants to cut costs in Florida’s pension fund by requiring more than 600,000 government workers, including police officers, teachers, firefighters, judges and retirees, to contribute 5 percent to their retirement. New employees would use plans similar to a 401(k). This has angered state workers, who have gone without a general raise since 2006. They plan large demonstrations around Florida on Tuesday.
Maybe this is what Floridians wanted, but I doubt it. On the other hand, it's what they should have expected. Rick Scott may be the looniest, most dishonest, powerful elected official in the country. And it was easy to see that going in. Stay tuned.
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digby 3/08/2011 10:00:00 AM
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Yeah justin
Hoover is an economic god to you
And McCarthy was your hero
And Obama caused the recession
And doubling the DoD budget in recent years doesn't appear on your radar as you bemoan and whine about even the littlest of taxes.
And redirecting ANY money from wasteful programs to health reform, or instead washing it down the drain in a vast sea of DoD related spending and foreign wars is the death of us all.
And having the lowest taxes in the western world after we gave the wealthiest even more money (recent tax deal) to send overseas is just not good enough.
And you are smarter than Dr Reich and about 99% of economists who have concluded that hoover indeed was an economic dolt and ushered in the Great Depression and that FDR/WWII ended it.
You are naive to think the US will thrive in a laissez faire business model where taxes and gvmt regulation are a historic remnant. There's no historic precedent for your belief, and indeed, everytime we or anyone else have tried that, we have been predated on by the wealthy elite and suffered terrible economic shocks. And that includes the Great Depression, the Great Recession, and several shocks in the 19th century that few Americans have ever heard about except in vague terms of Robber Barons and the like.
Every time we lower taxes on the wealthy, almost half that money disappears into overseas investments or tax shelters. That's the giant sucking sound you hear, and msoja mistakenly believed was ACA.
I'm all for low taxes, but not for gutting them mindlessly. Clinton era high end tax rates were reasonable and helped balance the budget, and anything lower IMO is destructive to our economy and std of living.
I'm all for for smart elimination of regulation, but not for mindless gutting them.
As a 12 year USAF vet, I'm all for strong defense, but not the current wars and not the doubling of the DoD budget as BushJr did.
Evaluating whether a program has a NET negative or positive effect on the economy involves a fair assessment of all variables, something freeloaders like you aren't capable of doing. Some of the variables you enumerate would indeed be problems, except that you forgot to mention the variables in the package that outweigh your negatives. For example, ensuring that 32 million people have affordable care and won't go bankrupt or die are positive factors that HELP the economy and outweigh your variables.
And your blatant hatred of the CBO process also shows you are a wingnut whose opinions are distorted by ideology.
You fail to cite that GOP predictions are even worse than CBO predictions, and that the main reason CBO predictions are often wrong is that the underlying assumptions of those predictions change as a result of partisan actions by later Congresses and admins.
I am no longer a Republican because I came to learn that they engage in the biggest lies of all. You are the kind of propagandist that caused me to abandon that party--the party of debt, fear and big lies
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