Today’s hump-day column will be a Florida-centric one, starting with a little gushing over the founder of the CO Nation feast himself, the great and powerful CO, who has been doing an excellent job curating and commenting on an interesting variety of stories lately.
As I’ve started writing more columns, I’ve taken less time to comment on the stories and columns – and the comments – here, but everybody has been hitting the ball hard lately! The COSIE’s offerings have been great – and not just because of the awesome Aussie pics – and Christopher Silber keeps breaking down economics and Chinese history in columns that make me feel smarter after reading each one. The Correspondent for Thinly Researched Conspiracy Theories doesn’t write often enough for my taste, but each posting is a gem.
In an online world that sometimes seems to consist mainly of Temu ads, porn, and fighting characterized by the bad manners born of keyboard courage, this site continues to be a refuge, with the comforting ambience of a virtual corner pub. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to hang out here and crack wise!
I have one more request of CO, and that is for him to post a review of the Elvis Costello concert he went to a few days ago. I’ve been a huge fan of Elvis since the “My Aim is True” days, but have never seen him live. So please assuage my jealousy, and allow me to live vicariously through your account of the evening.
Okay, since I’m a “count your blessings” kind of optimist, CO’s recent post about the amazing roll that Florida is on lately got me thinking.
You remember the bullet points: The #1 economy for the third consecutive year; #1 in new business formation; fewest state workers, lowest per capita debt, second-lowest per capita spending, law-and-order policies; lowest in-state tuition; no state income tax, etc.
Fortunately for us, we don’t take all of this for granted, because televisions and computers exist. And each day we can use them to check on how things are going in the blue cities and states in this great nation. And… yikes!
Comparing Florida to blue states is enlightening, and allows for some healthy, Nelson Muntzian “Ha-Ha!” gloating, with a side of soul-restoring in-your-face-y “I told you so!”
For example, I lived in my beloved home state of Illinois for my first 24 years, and have been in Florida for the last 39. Florida’s financial success and growth is the mirror opposite of what’s been going on in Illinois. They’ve got a state income tax and higher property taxes, but their infrastructure is deteriorating. They’ve got a greedy D-irigible for governor, and we’ve got a lean, mean D-Santis.
They’ve welcomed in hordes of illegals, and they’ve spent $2.5 billion – with a “b” as in “bonehead” – on them in the last three years, and their state debt is amongst the worst in the nation. Chicago public schools just announced that they’re staring at a shortall of $750 million (with an “m” as in “moron”), and will have to make deep cuts to their already atrocious system.
Florida grabs our illegals and flies them to Martha’s Vineyard. And then we laugh and laugh at the rich white liberals panicking and giving the noble brown folks the bum’s rush right off of their precious island.
The most obvious counterpart to Florida is California, and there too, the big picture is obvious. Florida is economically health and vibrant, while California is stagnant and covered in feces and the bodies of homeless people, some of whom may have actually been dead since February.
Florida cops fight crime; California cops fight for their lives. Florida is building; California watches their buildings burn down.
Florida’s main immigrant group is plucky Cubans who came legally, and will punch you in the face if you say something nice about communism. California’s main immigrant group is (mostly) entitled Mexicans who came illegally, and will punch you in the face if you say something nice about America.
We prepare for hurricanes, and when one knocks a bridge down, we rebuild it in 72 hours.
Californians drain their reservoirs and allow homeless addicts to make campfires among their native kindling plants, and when entire zip codes burn to the ground (unexpectedly!), they issue permits to rebuild…to the great-grandchildren of the owners, just in time for the tri-centennial celebrations in 2076.
Both states have a Disney park. When covid hit, Florida’s Disney World closed for less than 4 months, and re-opened to a blizzard of headlines along the lines of “Reckless Red State Re-opens ‘Disney Dachau’ Despite Raging Epidemic that Will Kill Us All!”
Meanwhile, CA’s Disneyland was closed for over a year, while they watched people enjoying Florida’s Disney World, and waited for the pile of bodies stacked up like cordwood that never materialized.
Both states took on an ambitious high-speed train project. Florida built the Brightline to connect Miami and Orlando (with a stop near the CO compound and world headquarters). The project broke ground in mid-2014, with a few parts of the route opening in 2018 and the entire line being finished by September of 2023. It was largely privately financed, and cost $6 billion.
California’s high-speed rail project was talked about since the 1990s, and was approved by voters in 2008, with the goal of linking San Francisco and Los Angeles by 2020 for an estimated cost of $33 billion. But CA politicians all held their hands out, and CA environmental activists all stuck their feet out, and it was decided that Phase 1 would join the small inland towns of Bakersfield and Merced, neither of which most Californians had ever heard of, except for those who had heard the song “Streets of Bakersfield.” (Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam did it best.)
By the time Trump took office this year – five years after the line was supposed to have been completed – the estimated cost had ballooned to $128 billion, with an estimated completion sometime in the 2030s. At this point, a grand total of zero feet of track has been laid, for the low, low price of… wait for it… $7 billion dollars!
So if you’re counting on your abacus at home, that sums up the difference between the prudent, conservative governance in Florida and the Marxist/Leninist Schiff-show that is Democrat rule in California:
The citizens of Florida got a high-tech train joining thriving population centers in 9 years and at the cost of $6 billion dollars.
Meanwhile, the likes of Haircut Newsom and Big Mouth Bass took 17 years and only one billion more dollars to provide Californians with no tracks laid between two towns that nobody wants to go to anyway.
Newsom/Mamdani, 2028!
Also…
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 