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TAMPA - In the world of Johnnie Byrd, speaker of the Florida House, there are optimists and pessimists.
The optimists are people like him who believe Florida's economy is basically healthy, he told a Tampa political club Friday.
Restrain government's desire to spend in tough financial times and the economy will be better for it in the long term, Byrd said.
Then there are the pessimists - such as people in the Florida Senate, and their media enablers - who say the sky is falling, the Plant City Republican said.
If they convince enough people, then higher taxes will surely follow, he said.
"You can either be an optimist or you can be a pessimist," Byrd told the Tampa Bay Tiger Bay Club on Harbour Island. "And I am an optimist about the future. And it is good."
Byrd faced tough questions from the somewhat liberal group Friday. Members accused him of helping cut school funding, raising fees while promoting no new taxes, raiding trust funds and spending money on public relations while he asks others to tighten their belts.
The speaker told them not to believe everything they read in the newspapers, while largely ducking questions about fee increases, spending from trust funds and the increased size of his House staff.
He claimed school spending will increase by 6 percent while enrollment will climb just 2 percent. He said fee increases represent the House's attempt to have them reflect the costs of the government services they help fund. And he said the Florida economy is growing.
Byrd took several swipes at the Senate, and particularly its president, Jim King, R-Jacksonville. He said Republicans in the Senate have joined with liberal Democrats to promote using gambling money to raise money for government. They have painted the economy in the bleakest terms, he said.
"Their whole purpose was to make the economy look as bad as possible so they could make excuses to raise taxes," he said.
In an interview afterward, Byrd said the Senate subscribes to an outdated philosophy he likened to the television show Wild Kingdom. In his metaphor, the Senate is a hungry lion on a parched plain. "So they chase down the slowest antelopes and put a tax on them," he said.
Questioned about criticism of the legislative session leveled by Gov. Jeb Bush, also in town Friday, Byrd said the two chambers wrestled with tough issues. There were budget challenges, referendum mandates from voters on class sizes and indoor smoking, and "crises" in workers' compensation and medical malpractice.