Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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April 28
The Orlando Sentinel on Sen. Rick Scott and his opinion on unemployment:
To Florida’s junior senator, the unemployed are today’s welfare queens, out to game the system and cheat the taxpayer.
In a recent fundraising email, Sen. Rick Scott warned would-be donors, “Businesses looking to reopen are telling us their employees don’t want to come back to work because they collect more on unemployment.”
Really? Because the CEO of Domino’s Pizza told investors in an earnings call last week that he’s seen a “very significant increase in applicant flow” despite the more generous federal unemployment payments.
We reached out to Scott’s office for specific examples of who was saying employees don’t want to work and were told, “We’re not going to get into private conversations the Senator has had…”
The office provided links to news stories that provided anecdotes out of Washington state and Kentucky. It also provided a tweet from the owner of a Pinellas County staffing firm, who told us in an email that some potential employees have said they’re not interested in applying for jobs right now because they’re receiving unemployment benefits.
There you have it. A few anecdotes to shore up Scott’s conviction that Americans won’t go back to work because they’re briefly living it up on the government dole.
The source of their newfound riches? A pandemic-induced federal unemployment payment of $600 per week through July 31 to augment each state’s unemployment benefits.
Scott was one of four senators who tried to hold up the payments a month ago in a coronavirus relief package because he didn’t want anyone to make more off unemployment than they were making at work.
What gall. Scott’s own state is a national bottom feeder in household income, so even when people are working they often don’t make enough to pay basic bills. We know that too well in the Central Florida metro area, which ranks last in median wages. But Sen. Scrooge wants to make sure that even in these extraordinary circumstances the service class doesn’t get one thin dime more than they were getting on the job.
One of the reasons Congress settled on a $600 lump sum rather than tying the benefit amount to each worker’s salary is because they knew that would create a logistical nightmare, resulting in long delays in payments when workers can’t afford to wait.
Even President Trump, in a recent attempt to criticize Democrats, acknowledged the shortcomings of state computer systems in arguing for direct federal payments to unemployed workers.
Florida’s car-wreck of an unemployment system can barely function as it is. Try to imagine if it was also tasked with calculating each worker’s federal benefit.
We have former Gov. Scott - and his legislative enablers - to thank for that state of dysfunction. They’re the ones who, back in 2011, imposed a backbreaking set of conditions for people to collect unemployment, along with reducing state benefits to as few as 12 weeks.
Scott has accepted no responsibility for the pain and anguish his revamp of the unemployment system has caused hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Floridians over the past six weeks. He’s subscribing to a new political philosophy of never apologizing, never accepting responsibility, always blaming someone else.
Asked about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ valid criticisms of the unemployment system he inherited, Scott’s spokesman told The New York Times that the senator did not “have time for dumb political squabbles.”
But he does have time to scapegoat the unemployed in fundraising letters and in a Fox News column, where he aired his grievances about the unemployed making out just a bit too well for his liking.
It’s bad enough that Scott takes such a dim, condescending view of his fellow Americans, but the statistics don’t even bear out the idea that his constituents in Florida are going to live large because of the federal unemployment boost.
A University of Wisconsin economics professor analyzed the effect in each state of extra unemployment compensation.
In the world of unemployment insurance, a key measure is what’s known as the “replacement rate.” In other words, how much does unemployment replace your working wage?
Before the federal stimulus, workers in Florida got about 38 cents in unemployment compensation for every dollar they earned. Even after you add in the extra federal money, Florida’s unemployed workers still won’t earn as much on average as they did while working, according to the study.
There’s a kernel of truth in the concern that some people might take advantage of the extra unemployment, much like, say, some hospital companies might take advantage of the government by committing massive Medicare fraud.
That doesn’t mean all hospital companies are unscrupulous. And neither are hard-working, dignified Americans whose goal is returning to work, not fleecing the government.
Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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April 28
The Palm Beach Post on Floridians and local governments stopping the spread of the new coronavirus:
Florida, we’ve gotten a bad rap.
America thinks we’re dumb, what with those beaches that were full of spring-breakers and the governor who wouldn’t call for a statewide stay-at-home order until he cleared it with his puppeteer in the White House.
But that isn’t the whole story. Not even close.
As the calendar turns to May, this is the time when the novel coronavirus was supposed to do its worst to the Sunshine State. But look around. For once, we’ve managed to avoid being the butt of a national Flori-duh joke.
This favorite getaway spot for New Yorkers has avoided New Yorkers’ horrendous fate in the COVID-19 pandemic. For once, we’re not the Sixth Borough. Our hospitals aren’t filled to bursting. We never had to use the field hospitals that were built in expectation of a deluge of dying patients. More than one-third of Palm Beach County’s 259 ICU beds are standing empty, according to Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration.
On a list of the nation’s worst hot spots, Florida is nowhere to be found; happily, the South Florida area ranks a lowly 101st among U.S. metro areas in the rate of new cases over the last two weeks, and 105th in the rate of new deaths.
Our slope of new cases is trending generally downward. Earlier this month, the number of cases in Palm Beach County was regularly increasing by more than 20% a day. Now the increases are in the single digits.
Back on March 31, the influential Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) projected that we’d be hitting a peak of hospitalizations right about now and suffering at least 6,700 deaths by Aug. 4. Less than a month later, the IHME now projects 1,914 deaths by Aug. 4.
The difference between those two outcomes - the truly horrific versus the merely very bad- is that we who love mah-jong and golfing and beach-going and clubbing and eating out so much, turned out to be good at social distancing.
According to Google mobility studies, Floridians cut their travel to restaurants, retail outlets and movie theaters by 49% as of April 11; to workplaces by 40%; to parks and beaches by 54%. In each category, we outperformed the U.S. as a whole. Floridians, for instance, took 20% fewer trips to groceries and pharmacies, compared with the nationwide reduction of 7%.
This is especially true in the South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach - which together account for over half of all of Florida’s 32,800 confirmed COVID-19 cases. Palm Beach County’s numbers are close to the state average, but people in Miami-Dade cut trips to work by 48%, retail sites by 58% and parks and beaches by 81%. Orange County, home of Disney, was in some categories even more disciplined than Miami-Dade.
All along, public health officials said that social distancing was our only real defense against a new, often deadly virus against which humanity has no vaccine nor cure. Credit the public’s good sense. Local leaders and residents took in the advice and acted on it, staying home and isolating even to the detriment of our bank accounts and sanity.
And in South Florida, particularly, we undertook these measures while Gov. Ron DeSantis hemmed and hawed. Miami-Dade declared a state of emergency (March 12) and enacted a “safer-at-home” order that cut all travel but essential activities (March 26). Following Miami-Dade’s lead and at Palm Beach County’s request, DeSantis issued a similar safer-at-home order to encompass Palm Beach, Broward and Monroe counties, too. Not until April 3, under pressure from all corners, did he put a statewide stay-at-home order into effect.
Credit the governor for not standing in the way of our localities - quite a different thing from leading the fight.
On Monday, DeSantis said that Florida’s current condition in the pandemic contradicts the “doom and gloom” and “doomsday talk” of a month ago - spread, he seemed to suggest, by an overly negative media. His implication was that Cassandras had over-reacted.
That’s wrong. With the governor refusing to lock the state down, we had good reason to brace ourselves for an onslaught. Then we listened to public health officials and stayed the hell home. We slowed the spread.
Now, as the county gingerly reopens modified forms of golf, boating and tennis, we can begin the slow and careful task of resuming the life we knew, but in a spirit of continued vigilance. This may be our reality for months to come: maintaining a six-foot distance and wearing masks in public; meeting friends over Zoom instead of over coffee; ordering a lot of take-out - with senior citizens venturing out but little.
We’re at a critical juncture. It would be easy to fall prey to a false sense of security. All the good work we’ve done so far can unravel quickly if we abandon social distancing too soon. Until we significantly ramp up testing, until we have the ability to trace the contacts of the COVID-positive, we cannot drop the safeguards that have brought us this far.
If we get lax, we’ll see infections soar.
Take it slowly, Florida.
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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April 24
The Daytona Beach News-Journal on making education a priority during the pandemic:
The youngest victims of the coronavirus might not have a cough, or a fever. But the effects could be lifelong - affecting their chances of success in school and in life for a long time to come.
And unless Florida’s leaders show extraordinary resolve, the impacts of a pandemic on public education in the state of Florida are likely to be grim.
Start with the reality that many students were ill-equipped for distance learning. Some students weren’t tech-savvy enough to take full advantage of virtual lessons and online conferences (particularly in counties like Volusia, which didn’t adopt the one-laptop-one-child model seen in adjacent Flagler County). Some didn’t have parents who would, or could, ride herd on their online learning activities. And some children just aren’t suited for the kind of learning that takes place outside a classroom, with no teacher to dispense smiles or head-shakes and no classmates to compete or collaborate with.
The governor’s task force on re-opening Florida’s economy proceeded with the assumption that schools will be ready for in-person learning by August. Even so, some children won’t recover quickly; one study, by the Northwest Evaluation Association, projects that younger students might lose up to 30% of their annual reading progress and half - perhaps all - of their annual math progress, the New York Times reported. Some may need to be held back - or ascend to a grade level they may not be prepared for. That’s just from the few months of disruption in mid-2020, not from the years of spending struggles that many predict will follow the virus-driven economic shutdown.
It’s a cruel irony that the 2020 budget was regarded as a major step back into the black for Florida schools, which often scraped through each budget year with funding increases that amounted to a few dollars or even pennies per student. Keeping that momentum going will be difficult, but Gov. Ron DeSantis should push lawmakers hard to fund schools, recognizing that many students will need more resources, not fewer.
A heavy burden will fall on Florida’s teachers, many of whom struggled to learn a new way of teaching. They will be asked to make further sacrifices as the school year progresses. Their unions’ resistance could be fatal to any attempt to get education back on track.
The next hurdle will be standardized testing, one of the best ways to compare year-to-year progress and measure student achievement. Testing has been badly abused in Florida - used to take money from struggling schools - but its merits for calculating learning gains and adherence to standards were always valuable. There will be no testing this year - if it returns next year, what can those results be compared to?
The picture isn’t all bleak. Some students took to technological learning with a gusto that surprised even themselves, setting the stage for a lifetime of independent thought and answer-seeking. Some parents learned to never again take a quality education for granted.
Getting public schools back on track will be a tough task, one that requires all parties - politicians, parents, teachers’ unions and school administrators - to agree on one straightforward principle: The children’s needs come first.
Online: https://www.news-journalonline.com/
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