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It feels like we are sliding backward down a slippery slope.
The "we" in this case is all of us. All of Florida.
The budgets being debated by legislators in Tallahassee this week carve deeply into many of the things we take for granted. The things that are eliminated are likely to change our lives in many ways.
Floridians who cannot get medical assistance could die. Teenagers who need the supervision of programs that prevent them from falling into a life of crime will fill our jails in the years to come. The child who might have been saved from drugs might live a very different life if he or she lives at all.
Counties and cities will have to cut services or raise their taxes to meet the additional expenses tossed their way by a state that is passing the buck anywhere it can.
The House, for instance, wants to discontinue a hallmark of Florida's most serious criminal investigations: the laboratory services of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
It sounds bureaucratic, but most of the people making this decision never saw a Florida without a professional crime lab to help local law enforcement.
Perhaps they should have been around in the mid-1960s when many cops and sheriffs didn't have those services and didn't want the intrusion of an outside law enforcement agency.
Back then people got away with murder - literally.
The initial House budget eliminated all the money for the lab services. On Friday the House restored some of the money for the 32 counties with fewer than 75,000 residents.
In counties and cities where they will have to pick up the tab for experts, how often do you think they'll be willing to seek it? How many DNA tests will be conducted? How many criminals will walk free because the evidence to convict them and send them to jail won't be there?
Unfortunately this is a process where the folks who hired the best lobbyists get the most reward.
There is weirdness here. While cutting deeply into education and health care programs and talking endlessly about "living within our means," some House Republicans vehemently objected to an amendment sponsored by Democrats that would have limited the annual salaries of state university presidents to $225,000 in state funds. In the end, a majority apparently realized how stupid that looked and they adopted the amendment.
It was a rare moment in a heavily scripted debate in which the Republican majority had determined in advance which amendments would pass or fail. So scripted was it that most of the lobbyists who normally jam the fourth floor outside the House chamber went home instead of trying to send in their own amendments. No use wasting a bright, sunny afternoon inside the Capitol when little could be changed.
Big Bird won bipartisan support as he survived an attempt by Republican Fred Brummer, R-Apopka, to raid public broadcasting budgets to divert the money for charter schools.
A few "turkeys," the pork barrel projects that the Senate has rejected this year, were restored in the House, but they are unlikely to survive.
The House and Senate budgets are far apart but both cut deeply into the fabric of Florida life. The Senate added an extra $1-billion of imaginary money to soften the blow, but the additions are subject to finding a way to raise the money with tax increases or expanded gambling.
Extra money doesn't seem likely when the House and Gov. Jeb Bush have rejected taxes and gambling. So lawmakers will have to make the awful decisions that determine who lives and what kind of lives Floridians will have.
It is not a pretty picture.