Category: The Sunshine State

Property insurance reform in Florida

Alex Sink, our State Financial Officer, says the property insurance policies dropped by Nationwide this month is not a sign that insurance reform failing to live up to it’s promise. She says the State Farm move last month isn’t a sign either. “This is an opportunity for Floridians to shop around for a better policy.” So says Alex Sink.

I voted for Alex Sink, and now I’m disagreeing with Alex Sink. Nationwide and State Farm are two of the big property insurance carriers in Florida. When they stop writing policies, or dump some of their existing policies, the supply of insurance goes down, while simultaneously increasing demand (unless those dropped policies belonged to dead people). Economics 101 says this usually results in an increase in price (in a free market… woo-hoo, free market!). Since insurance reform was passed with the expressed goal of: 1) keeping insurance costs for homeowners under control, and 2) reducing the risk for private insurers so they would continue to write (and keep) policies, then you’ve got to admit it looks A LOT like it’s not working.

Corn, courtesy of the rain

It isn’t the desert, but we still get enough sun to boil the brain case. Exhibit A: our governor (separated at birth from George Hamilton?).

Ah, but I didn’t start this entry intending to talk about the sun, or too-tan, Chain-gang Charlie. I wanted to talk about the rain. A busy day at work followed by a busy evening at home left my stomach (filled with antibiotics) ready for revolt. Salvation was delivered by mother nature: the rain. I love the rain. I miss the rain. I live in the lightning capital of North America**, so I see some rain. Usually it’s not the lingering, relaxing, steady rain. Instead it’s mother nature in full revolt. Not last night. Last night at bed time the relaxing rain fell, and an image slowly coalesced in my mind: the Earth taking a coffee break. Sure, it could have just been a little stress induced psychosis, but I like to think it was just a nice metaphor. I thought of that steady rain gently tapping on the roof, and I thought of Mother Earth sitting back and relaxing a bit. Sort of like sitting out back on a mild spring morning, nursing a cup of good coffee… watching the kids muddy their knees on the dew streaked grass, the squirrels chase each other from tree to tree, and a bee poking around in the citrus blossoms. I imagined her taking a drink because she enjoyed it, not just because she was thirsty.

It wasn’t a bad image to fall asleep to, psychosis or not.

**Many of my fellow Floridians mistakenly believe that this is the “Lightning Capital of the World.” Alas, that distinction is reserved for central Africa (at least, if National Geographic is to be believed).

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Nothing new to see here… just the silly way we elect a president

I’m quite the cynic this morning…

The two party political system has been in Florida news a lot lately. The reason? Florida has entered the absurd race to hold one of the nation’s first presidential primaries. Florida’s decision to enter the fray is particularly silly, since the Florida date is decided by the Florida state legislature, and they’re only in session for two months in the spring. Given the state of things, what was the chance that other states were going sit idle after Florida moved it’s date? Early May to November is a long time. In fact, it appears Michigan’s state legislature has just decided to leap-frog Florida (to January 15th).

This is a perfect example of the necessity of a strong Federal government. Left to their own devices, the states are turning our election process into a (bigger) joke.

For those not in the know, the move of the Florida date is particularly insidious. The Florida Legislature is controlled by an overwhelming Republican majority. However, the Democratic party has decided to sanction states who hold their primaries earlier than a certain date (I think it’s something like February 5th). The national Republican party apparatus has no such sanction. What is the sanction being threatened by the Democratic Party? They’re not going to count all or some Florida’s delegates at the convention (when the Democratic candidate is officially nominated/selected).

Effectively (pending almost certain litigation), the Republican led state legislature has disenfranchised all registered Democrats in the state of Florida (assuming the Florida primary will have any meaning anyway… due to every other state jumping over Florida between now and November).

Once again, Florida becomes the nation’s electoral joke… and this one isn’t particularly funny either. This is one of those times when I hate living here. There are those of you who might suggest moving… and Cheryl has frequently tossed around same idea. As you may already know, I can’t risk leaving behind my health insurance (with a possible re-emergence of my cancer looming, and temporary exclusions for pre-existing conditions common). So you’re stuck with me, and I with all of you.

Is Charlie Crist a pinko?

So sayeth the Wall Street Journal (via the St Pete Times):

It isn’t easy to put one of the more well governed states on the path to fiscal ruin in a mere three months, but it seems Florida Governor Charlie Crist is exceptional. His campaign to socialize Florida’s insurance market has placed the Sunshine State one big hurricane away from financial disaster….Mr. Crist and his fellow Republicans had better hope that predictions of more frequent hurricanes are wrong. Because when they hit, and taxpayers discover there’s no such thing as free insurance, what could get blown away is their governing majority.

I’ll bet plenty of WSJ staffers have visited, but have they lived here? One of the more well governed states? Holy hades, Batman! Jeb makes George look like a pinko. Crist, a political moderate, looks like a reanimated Lenin in comparison.

Note to the WSJ: under the status quo (in the so called “more well governed” state), Florida was ALREADY one big hurricane away from financial disaster. Private companies were dropping homeowner’s insurance policy holders left and right, claiming financial losses… while rates went through the roof, and profits remained steady – buoyed by auto insurance profits (which conveniently are operated under different ledgers). Meanwhile, the state run safety net for homeowners insurance (“Citizens”) was required by statute to charge a certain percentage more than private carriers (to protect private carrier’s profits, not having to compete with the state).

The state was already stuck covering all of the worst risks, after private companies cherry-picked properties with the least risk. Is the state really worse off taking on more policies… some with less risk, to balance out the cost of the more risky ones?

I may be a little slow, but that sounds like pretty good business to me.

The state of divorce

The St Pete Times reports on a New York Times article, which describes a survey by researchers Queen’s College, which finds that Pinellas County’s own Clearwater (Florida) has the highest percentage of divorced residents in the U.S.

I’ll bet you thought I was never going to get to that period.

The Florida Problem

According to the March 6th, 2005 St. Pete Times, Florida ranked 47th among the 50 states in per pupil (education) spending.

Keeping that in mind, consider a story I heard on the local public radio station this morning. They were discussing higher education funding, and they mentioned an interesting fact about the local, state university (the University of South Florida in Tampa). Apparently, they bus students to a nearby movie theater for some lecture classes due to a shortage of facilities on campus.

I think that pretty much sums up the state legislature’s spending priorities.

Name your favorite tax

Go ahead. I’m waiting for it. Any time now. What? You don’t have one? I’m not surprised. Taxation has gotten a bum rap since ancient times.

Studies have shown that people are into instant gratification. People will choose the lesser reward right away over a delayed, greater reward (up to a certain limit). So is it any wonder that we have little patience for paying taxes? The reward isn’t just delayed, it’s not always directly associated with having paid the tax in the first place. Three words: “taken for granted.”

In Florida, people are particularly impatient with property taxes… and with good reason. Until recently, property values have gone through the roof, and the taxes have gone up with them. Local governments have reduced the rates somewhat, but with the underlying increases in value, the taxes due have still gone up… in some cases by staggering amounts.

So over the last couple of years local governments have become everyone’s favorite tax-collecting whipping boy. Everyone wants to know where all that money has gone. Why do local governments have to spend so much money? Surely the cost to run local governments didn’t go up that fast… did it?

To be honest, I don’t know the answer to that question… but here’s a little food for thought. Jeb Bush was in office for 8 years in Florida, and in that time he cut state tax collections by an estimated 15 billion dollars. By most accounts, many of these cuts came in the way of corporate, business, an intangibles taxes. What do most of these taxes have in common? They tend to be taxes that people of “means” pay… but I digress.

So Jeb and the legislature did a little belt tightening and cut funding for state services, right? In some cases yes… but not all.

From the March 27, 2003 St. Pete Times:

County commissioners from across the state criticized Gov. Jeb Bush Wednesday for pushing billions of dollars in “special interest tax cuts” and blasted the Legislature for shifting the costs of state programs to local property taxpayers.

Remember when those kinds of stories ran during the Bush years? I do. Bush was in office during the eight years between 1999 – 2006, which means all that tax cutting (and some of that spending shifting) occurred during that time when property values were going up and local governments were spending more money. And it’s not like Florida (state government) was flush with cash when Bush came into office. Compared to other states, Florida ranked 49th in per capita state spending in 1998 – the year before Bush took office. (Florida ranked 47th in 2005.)

So relatively speaking, Florida spent a pittance before Jeb came into office, and from there cut state revenue. Considering how much money Florida was spending per capita before Jeb came into office, it’s hard to make the argument that state government was wasting a lot of money. If that’s the case, there’s only one way to cut that much money… reduce services, or have someone else pay for them. And mind you… they did all of this at a time when Florida was growing at a relatively high rate (in terms of number of people), requiring MORE spending on the kinds of non-recuring infrastructure improvements that are needed to sustain that kind of growth (roads/transportation, schools, etc). Who do you suppose had to pick up those costs while the state was cutting revenue?

So now the special session of the legislature is over, and we’re going to cut off the local government’s revenue too. I wonder how that’s going to work out.

As I’ve mentioned before, the real problem is that Florida has one of the most regressive and grossly unjust tax arrangements in the U.S. It was already bad when Jeb came into office, and it only got worse… and somehow he was wildly popular for this.

From the Jan. 12, 2003 St. Pete Times:

The poorest fifth of Florida’s working families now pay 14.4 percent of their income in state and local taxes, more than five times the rate at which the wealthiest pay. You’d have to go to Washington, at the farthest corner of the continental 48, to find a state that taxes more unfairly. The wealthiest Floridians – the 1 percent earning $289,000 or more – pay a scant 2.7 percent. Only five other states, all of them small, tax their wealthiest people any less.

Here’s what I suspect really happened. Jeb and the boys cut taxes on “wealth,” and passed certain costs on to local governments, who were able to pay for them with increases in property values (property taxes being the main source of revenue for local governments in Florida). Now the masses are waking up to the fact that they’re paying a lot MORE in taxes than they used to, and they’re blaming their local governments for wasting money. Meanwhile, all the folks that shifted those state expenditures (paid for by taxes on corporations and wealth) to local governments (paid for with property taxes, which more people have to pay) have all conveniently been term-limited out of office… and aren’t around to be held accountable. It’s a good thing we’ve got our county commissioners handy to kick around.

Oh I so love Florida politics.

One morning

My glaring weakness as an office bound civil servant is my penchant for daydreaming. Something catches my eye, stirs a memory, and away I go… off to lands far and wide. It can happen at home just as easily as at work. In fact, I just got back from a flight from the inner realm a little earlier this evening.

The catalyst for tonight’s journey was a photograph I took on a weekend getaway, about a year before our first child was born. We spent a weekend in Ft Meyers, a stone’s throw from Sanibel Island, at a resort just across the intercostal waterway on the mainland. The photo I was looking at is right above this entry… or was when I typed this… a shot of the clouds gathering off shore, a mile or two off the beach on Sanibel Island. While the selection of that picture has significance beyond the scope of this entry, it reminds me of one of my favorite mornings of all time.

It was the first trip I took with my first SLR camera. I’d been dying to dabble in more serious photography (which I figured required something other than a point and shoot), and I had enthusiastically jumped at the chance to pick up an old Pentax that someone was giving away. As a recent college grad budgets were tight, we had aspirations of buying a house and having children, and I already had two relatively expensive hobbies (cycling and computing)… so I’d been waiting for an SLR for a long time. It’s only power requirement was a small watch battery for the light meter (everything else was manual). There was no built in, auto flash; there was no auto focus… and I loved it. If I wasn’t such a stickler for the instant gratification of digital photography, I’d probably still be using that old Pentax (out doors anyway… the external flash unit died six years ago and I just couldn’t justify the expense of replacing it).

It was the first time my wife and I had stayed in an expensive resort (we were only there because we got the room for free). As I often did in the pre-children era, I brought my bicycle along. Cheryl was planning to sleep in, and I was in the habit of taking early morning, Saturday bike rides. So just before sunrise on our first day I walked my bike out the resort lobby in my lycra outfit, my cycling cleats clicking on the ceramic tile (in case I wasn’t conspicuous enough), sporting a backpack containing my newly acquired Pentax and lenses.

I couldn’t take any pictures for about twenty minutes because of the change in temperature and relative humidity, going from the resort to the muggy early morning outdoors… all the lenses fogged right up. On other days I might have been frustrated, but it was an otherwise gorgeous Florida morning, and I set out across the deserted causeway heading out to Sanibel Island. The sun was just peaking above the horizon and I felt like I was the only person awake in the world. It was quiet. The water was calm; like a sheet of glass. I was on my bike traveling a road never before traveled, and the scenery was postcard Florida. After my camera lenses warmed up I’d stop and dismount to snap the occasional shot with the Pentax.

Put together my love of bicycling, the excitement of exploration, the serenity of my surroundings, and the fun playing with my new (long sought after) toy… and you’ve got one hell of a morning.

We don’t do that kind of thing often enough. Maybe that’s something we’ll have to change when I get better.

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Doesn’t anyone love me?

**Note: although money is discussed in this entry, it’s not primarily about money. There are few things in this world that I need which I don’t already have. By that measure I feel very fortunate.

Chances are you don’t know me, but because of today’s political climate I’ll bet I could tell you one thing about me and you’d instantly think you did.

I work for the government.

Thanks to the modern conservative movement in America, this means you probably think the following:

  1. I couldn’t get a better real job.
  2. I’m not particularly bright.
  3. I’m lazy.
  4. I do just enough to get by.
  5. I have no incentive to do better.
  6. My job could be done just as well, if not better, by a high school dropout at a quarter the cost.

I’m not normally given to self promotion – I think modesty is a virtue. There are, however, a few things I’d like to say about myself which I hope will dispell a few myths. If you know me, you may know that I can sometimes be self-depreciating to a fault. I hope this will lend me a little credibility now…

The University of Florida has the second highest number of National Merit Scholars enrolled – behind only Harvard, is ranked 13th among public university undergraduate programs by U.S. News and World Report (2006), and I graduated from there with honors (my terrible writing notwithstanding).

I think my academic achievements suggest there might be a few things I could do, other than government work – if I chose to do so. Granted, there are reasons I chose to do what I do… knowing full well that pay was not going to be one of them. It has been claimed (although I’m not sure how reliable the source is) that Florida ranks 50th in average pay per state employee – so it goes without saying that I’m not exactly raking in the dough.

But again, I knew that coming in.

What gets to me, every now and again, is how little my efforts are appretiated by my employers – that’s you… the tax payer.

Despite three statewide productivity awards (awarded by an independent organization – Florida TaxWatch), more superior yearly evaluations that I can count on my fingers, and more lesser awards than you’d care to hear about… I’ve received exactly one merit pay raise in twelve years.

How can this be, you may ask? Surely it’s because I’ve overstated my acheivements. No, it’s because you and and the people you elected chose not to. There have been three or four years when merit pay increases were available at all… and then only a handfull were available to go around, statewide… so it’s a wonder I got one at all. I’m clearly an EXTREMELY rare exception in this way. Most of my hard working coworkers haven’t gotten a whiff of a merit raise the entire time they’ve been here (in some cases going on twenty years).

That leaves the pay increases doled out by the legislature, given to all of us. You see, the only way our pay goes up is if it’s approved by the legislature. There’s no such thing as a “cost of living” increase in Florida. Of my twelve years in state employ, I don’t recall an annual pay increase more than 2.5 percent. Often it’s less. One year there was no increase at all, and two years (including this year) there was a one time bonus paid (in lieu of a raise). By the way, there’s no such thing as bonuses in Florida (government that is) either… not in any regular sense. They only come when the legislature is looking to pay us off for not granting an increase. And what’s so nefarious about a bonus? It’s because it looks like more than it is. It’s not permanent. Next year, when we’re not getting a bonus, and our legislature grants us a generous 2 percent raise… that’ll make 2 percent in permanent raises in two years. The reason the legislature gives occasional bonuses instead of raises is because it decreases long term expenditures. If our raises aren’t even keeping pace with the cost of living in the first place, and the legislature is looking to save EVEN MORE money on our salaries… you know it’s not good for us.

So you ask me what incentive I have to do better, and I ask you the same thing. What incentive do I have to do better than just get by… the absolute minimum asked of me by my employer?

Other than a sense of pride or duty to those I serve, the answer is I don’t.

But again, I knew most of this going in. There are those of you who will reply, “alright, if you hate it so much go do something else!” The fact remains that money is not the only consideration. I like what I do. I like the opportunity it affords me; to make a small contribution to the public at large. Department policy forbids me from discussing many of the details of what I do, on a day to day basis, but I can say this: there are days when I can talk to a client and know I’ve made a permanent change in their life… for the better… and it’s hard to describe how gratifying it can be.

No, what troubles me is that you all apparently have so little regard for what we do. You paint us all with a wide brush, wet down with the occasional story of misdeed – sensationalized courtesy of your local “newstainment” investigative reporter.

You hold us in contempt and elect representatives who share your feelings, then profess surprise and outrage when one of us morphs into your self-fulfilling prophecy on the local news.

For all I care you can keep your damn money. A simple thank you would suffice.

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Politics and scandal

As I’ve said before, I spent the formative years of my political leanings in a hot-bed of liberalism; a university campus. As a junior, I went to my first campaign rally – for Clinton/Gore in the fall of ’92. My first presidential election as an “adult” was that ’92 election. I watched the man I voted for become embroiled in a couple political scandals, most notably the Jones/Tripp/Lewinski flap.

Now I get to see what it’s like from the other side of the political spectrum… and the cup runeth over.

The scandal du jour… today I read that my least favorite Florida politician, Tom Feeney, has been tied to the infamous Jack Abramoff. You remember Tom Feeney… he was the guy that created a new seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in his own back yard (while he was the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives) – effectively giving himself a promotion.

It seems that Mr Feeney underestimated the value of a trip he took, and denies he knew Abramoff paid for it. It turns out he was only off by about three or four hundred percent on the value of the trip – but hey, what’s fifteen grand between friends?

Oh, that’s right… he doesn’t know Jack.

All of this could be perfectly innocent. Hell, people are trying to give me twenty grand with no strings attached all the time.