It’s not a hijack. We’re talking about Rick Scott and you handwaved away his accomplishment by saying it was just because Florida hit bottom from the real estate bust.
Bringing up California proves you wrong. That’s not a hijack, although I agree that part of the discussion is pretty much settled and can end now.
Rick Scott actually does deserve much credit for reviving the state. Precisely because the other real estate boom/bust states failed.
How does he deserve credit? Seriously, what has he done?
Yes, the job rate has gone up, but I would argue that it would have gone up no matter who was in the mansion.
California isn’t comparable. Our real estate market rose much more quickly and much more recently (perhaps artificially relative to California’s, because we don’t have that stupid Prop 19 thing). Our job market growth has been almost entirely in the construction industry, too (we also made slight gains in manufacturing).
Scott promised to create 700,000 jobs in Florida in 7 years (he called it his “7-7-7-” plan but somehow avoided being lumped in with Herman Cain as a loon who just yells out numbers). He’s actually on pace to do that, assuming he gets another term, but here’s the kicker: the Department of Economic Opportunity or whatever it was called back then had already predicted that we’d add a million jobs post-recession anyway.
So basically his biggest achievement is to back up a campaign promise that he would grow the economy by less than it would have grown if he did nothing.
Heh. I was working on a government website at the time and we were told to put the 7-7-7 plan prominently on the site. After the media furor over the whole “that’s less than we expect anyway”, we were told to take it down and make no further reference to it. 
FYI, it was the Agency for Workforce Innovation (AWI) before it was DEO (which is too close to DOE (Education) and confuses people all the time) - before that it was DLES - Department of Labor and Employment Security. What can I say, we like to rename things.
The funny thing is I correspond with them on a regular basis and still don’t know when they’re called what. And by regular basis, I mean I send them a stack of forms every week to find out if certain people have filed for unemployment.
I’ve taken to leaving the agency name out of the address on the letter, and just addressing it to the person who deals with such things. Her name hasn’t changed in seven years. 
It’s possible I know her. I worked over there for a couple of years. Have they turned on the new system yet?
Not sure. We still have to do everything by paper because that’s what the Division of Workers’ Compensation requires.
Scott didn’t raise taxes. Scott solved Florida’s budget problems in his first year. For Jerry Brown, not only has the budget been an ongoing problem, but he’s raised taxes to close the budget gap.
Now we can argue about how those policies affect employment, but Florida has performed better than California. The two governors’ differing economic policies can explain it as well as anything else.
He didn’t “solve” anything. He gutted everything that he didn’t personally care about. That’s like saying Obama would be solving the federal budget issue if he vetoed all discretionary spending.
That’s just the Blorida way!
That’s one way of looking at it as well. Except that Florida has been allowed to grow consistently, while California’s growth has been in fits and starts. The last few months have been disastrous for California, with their unemployment rising while the rest of the country’s drops.
Well, we haven’t even had the primaries yet; other candidates might emerge.
Crist is the definition of a political opportunist. There’s a reason he got blasted in the race against Rubio and Meeks. He says what he thinks will get him elected. Scott, while not perfect, has shown to be a competent governor. This is definitely not a case of the “lesser of two evils”.
No, it isn’t. Far better an opportunistic more-or-centrist than a sincere committed RW who follows the lead of ALEC. That’s a case of could-be-better vs. evil.
Yeah, not even close. He’s a “drown-the-baby” tea-partier. Hell, even the GOP had to slap him down a couple of time.
Believe me or not, I have worked with state government in Florida for going on 20 years. And I wasn’t kidding earlier, his executive office is reaching down into regulatory agencies in an absolutely unprecedented way and doing damage that will take 10 or more years to undo. Literally THOUSANDS of years of experience are being forced out for industry cronies who could give a shit.
Crist’s lead seems to be growing even though Scott’s unfavorability rating has bottomed out. Interestingly, Allen Fucking Insane West leads Scott by a point in the latest PPP poll (among GOP primary voters.)
Tax rates have nothing to do with unemployment. In fact, governors have very little to do with unemployement, whether it goes up or it goes down. You can’t have it both ways, arguing on one hand that “government is completely incompetent and can’t do anything” and on the other that “golly, when we’re in charge of government, it creates jobs”.
If governors have little to do with unemployment, how come employment just happens to be doing better in states with Republican governors, while Illinois and California continue to be the worst laggards?
Those two states raised taxes. A lot.
Because rural residents tend to be conservative, and the current wave of unemployment is hitting urban residents hardest. Got any hard questions?
And California’s problem isn’t that they raised taxes a lot. Rather, most of California’s problems are due to the fact that they can’t raise taxes as much as they need to, due to idiotic conservative policies that got entrenched in the state constitution.
Big industrial states are more susceptible to swings in the economy and have Democratic bases, small rural states are less susceptible and have Republican bases. It isn’t that Republicans manage states better, it’s that states with less volatile economies tend to be redder.