| What's It Like to Wake Up From a Tea Party Binge? Just Ask Florida! Feb 20th 2013, 20:22 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...ash-rick-scott Wow....the dishonesty of the tea party, and Rick Scott is just breathtaking... Quote:
WHEN HE RAN FOR governor as a political neophyte in 2010, Rick Scott's main credential was his vast wealth, much of which he accumulated running Hospital Corporation of America. During Scott's tenure, HCA was caught systematically defrauding federal health programs of millions of dollars through elaborate schemes to overbill the government for various services, including care it never provided. In 2000, the company pleaded guilty to 14 federal felony charges and paid $1.7 billion in fines in what was the largest government fraud settlement in history. A few months after the federal investigation was announced, Scott was forced to resign, but not before snagging a $310 million golden parachute.
Scott was not the choice of the state's GOP establishment, but tea partiers loved him for his opposition to Obamacare and devotion to fiscal austerity, and he won the governorship by a single percentage point in 2010. Conservative Republicans also picked up seats in the Legislature, giving the GOP a supermajority at a time when Florida was facing a $3.6 billion budget shortfall.
Florida has never been known as a big-government state. An economy driven by tourism and real estate speculation has at times made it a haven for the less-than-scrupulous rich—Florida law helped O.J. Simpson shelter his assets in a mansion near Miami and avoid paying a civil judgment he owes Nicole Brown's family. With no personal income tax, Florida collects some of the lowest taxes in the nation, leaving the government chronically starved for cash.
Even so, Scott rode into office with a promise to slash spending further. He unveiled his first budget in February 2011, at a private meeting with tea party activists, and publicly released it at a tea party rally.
The "jobs budget," as Scott dubbed it, called for $4.6 billion in spending cuts, with education taking the biggest hit ($3 billion). It included a 17 percent cut to the agency that serves the disabled and proposed dropping virtually everyone but children and pregnant women from a state health program for the medically needy. The savings would be used to slash the corporate income tax from 5.5 to 3 percent, with the goal of eliminating it entirely by 2018. The budget also called for reducing property taxes by $1.4 billion, and cutting unemployment insurance taxes by $300 million, even though Florida's unemployment trust fund was bankrupt. US News columnist Peter Roff dubbed Scott's budget a "tea party dream" and speculated, somewhat prematurely, that it "almost assuredly gets him on the short list for vice president in 2012 or, depending on the outcome of that election, for president in 2016."
Scott didn't get everything he wanted, but the final budget approved by the Legislature was $4.6 billion smaller than it had been in 2006, even though the state's population had grown by more than 700,000. And Scott vetoed a record $615 million worth of spending for, among other things: homeless veterans, meals for seniors, whooping-cough vaccines for low-income mothers, an independent living center for the developmentally disabled, and, of course, public radio.
| There's loads more at the link. I feel disgust for these people even more now. |  |
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