My last post on unemployment came from a News Hour piece on Florida’s unemployment system. The beast has been well and truly starved there: Florida pays about 50% of those eligible for unemployment, they use a computer system installed during the Nixon administration to do it, and if you do get benefits, the rate is the fifth lowest in the country.
Florida’s schools are “consistently ranked in the bottom 25 percent” nationwide. Adoption by gay couples is still banned, and they’re close to having a referendum on an abortion-banning “personhood” amendment. And you’re less likely to have employer-provided health insurance.
So, in this conservative paradise, losing your job or getting sick is a bigger risk. If you want to have children, you can’t be gay, and you need enough money to send them to private schools. And, speaking of kids, you’d better be good with the birth control, since it looks like abortion isn’t going to be an alternative.
In short, you need to be really fucking lucky to live there.
I’m not trying to single out Florida — I’m sure this is the general state of affairs for most states where tax cutting and bible banging have dominated politics for decades.
RedKitten
So, how’s that Bible-y, conservative-y thing working out for them?
raff
I live in Canada. I feel really fucking lucky. Every fucking day.
Zifnab25
Florida followed the Texas model. Lower taxes into the dirt and draw in more and more business from out of state. Then, use the increased revenue from business growth to fund what would otherwise be an unsustainable deficit in spending versus income.
Texas and Florida both have a history of running over budget and making up the difference by slashing services. GOoPers hold them up as models of success, because they have continuous business growth. But only at the expense of their northern neighbors. Like China or Mexico, they can only exist with richer countries feeding them customers and money. Without a positive trade deficit, they crumble.
Undercover FBI Agent DougJ
So, how’s that Bible-y, conservative-y thing working out for them?
I like this.
beltane
If you’re old and very, very rich, Florida is not such a bad place to live. But even the moderately well-off elderly who become incapacitated enough to require services, often find that Florida is not the paradise they expected.
Coincidentally, most of the health care/insurance horror stories in my circle of acquaintance originated in Florida. things are better in the Northeast; they really are.
Keith G
Why not? It’s a great example. Greed and stupidity are every where, but Fla has more than most. It’s one place that climate change will definitely improve.
Julia Grey
Plus, by offering so much low-tax business incentive, Florida has exacerbated its fresh water problems to crisis levels, and has no income to meet that crisis. Long-term, they’re burying themselves even deeper.
Derelict
Like Arizona, Florida’s economic model is based on non-stop development. When development stalls, everything else comes to a screeching halt.
Remember Jeb Bush? Remember how he spent his time jamming Xtianity down everyone’s throat in every aspect of government? Everything from Bible Camp Release program for prisoners to state funding for Xtian schools.
eric
There is a sense that the Washington Consensus has been largely discredited as an economic “model” (really a course of destruction) for the third world development, except in the US. How is that racy-to-the-bottomy thingy working for ya? Also, too.
Jager
When my old company expanded into Florida, the VP of Finance came back from a due diligence excursion to our new outpost and said, when asked about Florida, “a lot of shit washes up on the beach”
Mike in NC
For college, the wife attended some party school in Fort Lauderdale and had a great time. She immediately ruled out us retiring to Florida after the last few visits. Too much crime, pollution, congestion, and crazy old people on the roads.
Linda Featheringill
Keith G:
I know other people who are looking forward to the effect that rising sea levels will have on Florida – with about a third of it under water by mid-century and staying that way for the next thousand years or more.
And, of course, if the current estimates of how high the water will get is on the low side, we might lose even more of the state.
Whackjob Militia Leader soonergrunt
I’m still up for that company job in Florida as far as I know. I should hear more this week.
Florida sounds like a great place to live as long as your income is sourced outside the state. Luckily, that will be the case if I get the job.
RedKitten
@Undercover FBI Agent DougJ: I knew you would.
‘Tis true, though. Florida is a prime example of what happens when conservatives get to run the show…and it DOES NOT WORK.
stickler
“Really fucking lucky?”
No. Try “eligible for Medicare.” And voting accordingly: “I got mine, Jack, so fuck you.”
jcricket
So here’s what I wonder. It basically seems like there’s going to be three “types” of states in the future:
1) States with higher taxes and high services – largely “blue” (see WA state, as an example). Lots of jobs at the high-end and low-end, maybe less in the middle.
2) States, with low taxes and low services – largely “red”, and probably large amount of low-wage jobs here. Also with little environmental regulation, lax labor laws, etc.
3) Declining states (population, jobs, etc.) – mixture of rust belt and midwest/deep South states not capable of making #2 work.
So the real question is does #1 work, or #2? And for how long? They really are two different visions for America. Note there’s no place for the middle class in either scenario.
SiubhanDuinne
@Zifnab25:
Texas and Florida were both governed by two of Poppy Bush’s charming and oh-so-competent sons. Coincidence?
Kristine
My folks moved from NY State to the west coast of Florida in the mid-60s. Up to that point, my mom had earned very good money as a bookkeeper/timekeeper for largish companies. In Florida, she was forced to take a job where she made less in a month than she used to make in a week in NYS. Wages were known to be well below average there, and employee health insurance was rare. Sounds as though things haven’t changed much.
Citizen_X
Meh. Whole damn state’s going to be underwater in a couple of hundred years. I won’t miss it.
Scott H
what stickler said. the state’s great if you’re retired and living off the socialist teat provided by the feds.
SiubhanDuinne
@Citizen_X: I lived in Florida for six of the longest years of my life (well, I thought that until I moved from Tampa to Flint-by-god-you’d-better-smile-when-you-say-Michigan, and thence to Battle Creek). I don’t miss anything about Florida. I’ve been back exactly four times since 1975, every one of them a business trip, and if I never set foot in the state again it’ll be too soon. I’ve thought for decades that they should just perforate the Florida-Georgia border, give the peninsula a little tug, and cast the whole damned state adrift in the Atlantic.
PurpleGirl
Friends moved to Florida in the mid-90s. Since he worked for IBM and it was an internal job change, his salary stayed at its former level from NYS. But she had to find a new job and found the salaries there were not commensurate with salaries in NY. They tried to get me to move to Florida but when I looked at administrative assistant jobs, I found that I was already making at least 10K more in NYC than I could in Florida. In Florida I was above the maximum salary offered even though in NYC I was only in the low to mid-range for my experience level. When he said “but Florida has no state income tax”, I laughed and told him that even adding NYS/NYC’s income tax wouldn’t come close to closing the salary gap at my level.
Alan
Yeah, conservatism has run a muck down here. Don’t get me started on property insurance. The big companies can cherry pick who they want to insure. So the state set up a nonprofit which forces every policy to be privatized to some fly-by-night D- rated company that has no money. It’s a great set up for a free-market, game-the-system crook.
WereBear
From spending a chunk of my growng up years there, I concluded that Florida’s attitude is: You’re not a tourist? F u.
Gozer
I was watching a documentary yesterday on another fab aspect of FL. Apparently there’s no tracking of prescription drugs in the state so it’s the number one source of such drugs for other states, particularly OH, WV, and KY.
You can walk into a “pain clinic” and get 300-1000 pills of percocet, oxycontin, etc. for a few hundred dollars (all legal). People then sell them illegally for 3 to 10 times the price at the dispensary (including old men and women who usually sell illegally to younger folks).
MaximusNYC
I grew up in Florida, and fled for NY 10 years ago. Everything said above is true.
In theory, it’s a purplish state. But the GOP always seems to have the edge.
For my whole life (I’m in my late 30s), the FL Dems have been weak and disorganized. Aside from Bob Graham and Lawton Chiles, they have almost always fielded weak, forgettable candidates.
Mo's Bike Shop
In the case of Florida, you really do have to include the influence of millions of retirees who think they paid at the door.
Careful with the schadenfreude, the max altitude for our nuke plants is five feet above sea level.
Jason
Low-wage laborer/immigrant to Florida here. Of my family of four (parents, brother, myself), my parents are relying on unemployment to keep our house and their church’s food ministry to keep our pantry stocked. My brother and I have minimum wage service jobs and help a little with bills.
If I can get through school I’ll get the fuck out of here.
Carol
All of this is why if I retire to somewhere warm, its going to be Cuba, where the third world conditions are combined with third world prices and first world humanity. Unless the post-Castro world goes truly insane, things may upgrade to a southern Sweden pretty quickly.
While the last crazy teabagger Republicans and global warming devour the Florida, Cuba will be trying to upgrade to the 21st century, and won’t mind taxing business to do it.
Ruckus
SiubhanDuinne@17
Texas and Florida were both governed by two of Poppy Bush’s charming and oh-so-competent sons. Coincidence?
Not even close.
The output of that family has severely screwed the US for decades. Maybe longer. And the “credibility” conservatives gained by this family being placed in positions of power has hastened the demise of any real, legitimate political power that conservatives may have had. Unfortunately it won’t end the illegitimate political power they use to wreck havoc on us.
frankdawg
I lived in Fla for a few years – it is a toilet with palm trees. The schools were an abomination the public facilities (libraries, parks & stuff) non-existent. It lives on tourists and federal handouts.
If we cut it free it would be a third world banana republic in 6 months.
And every experience I had with the medical system was a nightmare.
Kiril
gantlet
/grammarnazi
Shawn
Isn’t FLA also the headwaters of the Oxy Hiway because they have no system to track doctor shopping pill gatherers. Probably take tax money to do that…
John S.
Speaking as a Floridian (for 25 years), this is about the dumbest post full of stereotypes I have ever seen. I particularly love the drive-by commentary of people that visited for a week or lived here in the 70s and know exactly everything about what it means to live here.
But I guess we can’t blame the ignorance of the commenters for following mistermix’s lead. After all, despite having performed rather poorly in education rankings for quite some, Florida public schools ranked 8th in the nation according to Education Week.
Anyway, keep up the misinformation and stay the fuck out. Florida is much nicer with less assholes from up North in it.