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Candidates tiptoe past $1-billion question
© St. Petersburg Times Florida is supposedly named for the Spanish la florida, or flower. How pretty. How quaint. How mistaken. This is La-la Land. They need to start putting it on license plates. For we live in a state deep in fantasy. Mouse ears have nothing to do with it. We are in the middle of a race for governor. The fact that one candidate is a Republican, the other a Democrat, is supposed to signal they are immensely different. But when it comes to a most fundamental thing, Bill McBride and Jeb Bush are strikingly alike, as Times reporter Alisa Ulferts pointed out in a story last week. The two men aren't talking about the state budget. Doing so would pose immense inconvenience to either man. What politician wants to be the bearer of bad news? And bad news there will be next year, at least $1-billion worth. It's far more fun to talk about what you would do if you were governor. Why should you worry if what you say is deliberately misleading? The state is expected to have a $1-billion shortfall. State agencies could suffer huge cuts. Never mind what Bush and McBride want to do. Cut is what they'll have to do. The lack of difference between them on this fundamental matter is clear. Bush and McBride put their self-interest ahead of the public interest. Public interest would have them telling the truth. This is also a classic Florida tale. The candidates don't give you details because they don't want you to look too closely at the fine print in the contract. Like so much swampland, you'll discover you're buying a stack of promises that can never be fulfilled. How can they be, when promises made before are still hanging? The perpetually beleaguered Department of Children and Families is asking for $400-million to solve its latest knot of problems. Even before Bush and McBride make their pledges about improving the schools, the state will have to find a way to pay to accommodate thousands of new students. These are just a couple of examples. The budget crisis is so severe that even a few Republicans -- the usual anti-tax crowd -- tried to do something about it. Last spring, John McKay, the president of the state Senate, turned years of GOP tradition on its head and challenged the web of sales tax exemptions that businesses enjoy. You'd have thought McKay had invited the Bolsheviks to Tallahassee. The businesses got to keep their exemptions, although the sales tax break the public got every year just before school began was done away with. At least some of us are doing our part to prop up the budget. In the meantime, the governor who won't talk much about the crisis is quietly socking away money that state agencies haven't spent from their current budgets. It may be that Bush and McBride aren't talking about the budget because the scramble to find the cash is an annual thing, as regular as the return of the snowbirds. Nowhere does the will exist to find another way to conduct ourselves. So we lurch from year to year. In this atmosphere, no government program, no matter its worth, can be confident of its future. It becomes impossible to picture real change, because real change requires people who have the time -- free of the pressure of how to pay for tomorrow -- to stop, think, debate, disagree, reach some settlement. You hear a lot about how the public expects government to live on a budget just like a family. But no family could live the way the state does, unless it's a family so strapped it is always one paycheck from the street. -- You can contact Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Ernest Hooper Jan Glidewell John Romano From the Times Metro desk |
