Welcome to Our Little Part of Paradise That We Call Home

What more can we do to welcome the RNC to our little part of Paradise?

In order to assure our visitors safety we have spent fifty million dollars of someone else’s money.  Spiffed up our little nest and polished everything there is to be polished.  Swept the bums out of town so they aren’t an embarrassment to our visitors.  Our local football, the fabled and vaulted Bucs, will display their prowess on the field.  Our good governor has taken a hand in putting together a video, I have to guess, to welcome our visitors which among other things grandly mentions that the our state added one billion dollars to the education budget last year.  

Oh? Did they forget to mention the state budget for education was cut the year before by one point three billion. So I guess that means we are down by what? Three hundred million?  And so our visitors can enjoy the full Florida experience we will even toss in a hurricane, so our visitors can enjoy a real hurricane party - thank you Mister Isaac.

Given all of this and that … I have to wonder what else can we do to make our visitors welcome, to feel at home?

 Not to be alarmed its kinda like finding a alligator in your swimming pool, it ain’t no thing.  We know that the infrastructure here is not what it could be, what it needs to be.  Seems the projected expenditures to handle this type of problem are half of what they need to be.  And we aren’t spending money on maintaining our schools. But we cut taxes so we reduce wasteful government spending.  

Our governor in trumpeting the economic miracle that he, with the help of the state legislature, has brought forth, he touts the fact that there are 230,000 fewer unemployment recipients than when he took over from that turn coat. What isn’t mentioned is the growth in Florida’s Non-Agricultural employment which is 168,800 people. Keep in mind that our little part of paradise last month lost 7,900 jobs. This lead our region to a unemployment rate of 9.4%  

The labor force is made up of folks who are working and those collecting unemployment and/or those actively seeking employment.  If you aren’t collecting unemployment or are sitting by the dock on the bay - then ya don’t count.  If ya don’t count then the rate goes down.  The problem is the unemployment rate can managed to the political advantage of one or another person.  I’d suggest that we should look at the ratio of those working to those individuals who can work. In 2002 we saw a expansionary economy, in July 2002 the ratio showed 62.7 % of the population was working.  The most recent figure shows that 58.4 % of the population is working.  Bill Young to the contrary, the local, national and world wide demand for labor is not strong. Today the reality is that many able, capable and qualified workers can not find a job.  They aren’t to be found.  To reverse the downward drift in the labor markets, employers must have unsatisfied demand for their product or service.  Can you picture a restaurant owner turning away customers because he won’t hire another dishwasher or server?