Stop and think. How many children's minds could be opened by 2-million school books?
Surely, a lot.
But not here. Not in Florida.
We love living on the cheap. We have so loved it for so long that we treat our annual state budget crisis the way we do the annual hurricane forecast. Andrew notwithstanding, we tend to miss the big ones. So why worry?
This year is different, at least when it comes to the budget.
This year, the state House is on a collision course with reality. The House, led by a man who embarrasses all of the Tampa Bay area (he's one of us, from Plant City), Johnnie Byrd, is insisting on a budget with not a nickel of new revenue, no matter what. To make the thing balance, absurd cuts are proposed - $50-million less for books, for example. That money would buy those 2-million books.
I got the figure from state Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, chairman of the Senate appropriations committee. I thought the Republicans in Tallahassee were one big happy family, all of them chanting "Less Government, Less Taxes" all the time until I talked to Pruitt. I got the feeling he wouldn't mind seeing Byrd's head on a plate, nicely dressed.
This is how Pruitt described the House's budget, the one with the $50-million cut for school books: "It's death by a thousand cuts, eroding the social and educational infrastructure of this state."
Just so there's no confusion, Pruitt jumps in and says of himself, "You're not talking to some wild left-wing liberal who loves to spend money."
No, he's a Republican who came to realize that after years of cutting and cutting and cutting there's nothing left to cut. Some new revenue must be found somewhere, not for new programs, but just to pay for what's already in place.
It was impossible to miss the exasperation in Pruitt's voice on the other end of the phone. Under the House budget, school districts will not even be able to keep up with the ordinary annual increases in the cost of doing business. "This is simple math," he said.
None of that washes in the House, where Byrd chirps out a sort of daily weather report at the start of every House meeting. He says - really - that it's another great day in Florida.
Don't tell that to the teachers who could use those books.
Byrd must have been out Monday checking to see if the skies were blue. I couldn't reach him as I was writing this column.
Today will be a busy day for him. For Ken Pruitt, too. The House and the Senate will each approve their versions of the budget. Then in the next couple of weeks, they are supposed to sit down under Johnny Byrd's blue skies and try to do what he so far refuses to do, which is to say, compromise and find some way to find money to pay for some things that otherwise will go under Byrd's knife while he smiles. It's men like him who put the duh in Flori-duh.
Then the budget goes to the governor. Sen. Pruitt advised me not to assume Gov. Jeb Bush would side with Byrd, as has been widely reported.
We'll see.
I never did think it would come to this. I never did think the Republicans' cut, cut, cut-speak would end and that they would start shooting at one another. That they are shows just how grave the crisis is.
"I've got my values, in terms of my conservative fiscal values that I bring in here," Pruitt said. "But I'm a Floridian first."
In other words, some things you do because they're the right thing to do. Some needs you meet because you must. Like books. To open minds, you must have books.
