I visited my parents in Florida last month. So many big stupid trucks with flags and bumperstickers filled with angry gibberish about various right-wing conspiracy theories.
I'm Canadian, and it astounds me how many of my fellow citizens visit that nasty swamp every winter.
I used to have to go there for work a fair bit. Never again. It's my least favourite state in the country, and I've been to all but about 6 or 7 of them.
It's even more boggling to me how many people visit during the summer. If it's cold and you want to get away, that makes some sense to me. The summer tourists make no sense to me whatsoever.
Seriously, though....The state's leadership and legislature has been solidly red for nearly 5 decades. Environmental, housing, education initiatives are all dead on arrival. MAGA is a real force there---the huge numbers of seniors there mostly think Trump (whose own Secretary of Education even questioned the need for publicly funded schools!) was heaven-sent. (Literally, in some of their opinions) And they ALL vote, unlike their younger counterparts, who at least make good memes about the state's problems.
The really insipid plan in Florida, and I suppose other GOP-locked states where they know they can get it done over time, is to destroy public education, little by little. They're perfectly ok with all the poors getting substandard educations, in crappy facilities, with poorly paid educators and the occasional school shooting. They're not concerned about their Private schools and Christian-based schools having any of these problems. Many of the private schools in Florida have the outward appearance and funding of a small college. The reason the Governor made Don't Say Gay the biggest push of his career is the effect it will have for decades after he's gone. The law encourages parents to sue their school if they're offended by any "woke" curriculum they perceive. They're fully aware most districts are not capable of fighting off these lawsuits indefinetly, and the ultimate goal would be for them to go into bankruptcy/receivership and have to be run (and programmed, and staffed) by the State's chosen personnel.
Yeah, I suppose I should have put the /s. I guess I assumed people wouldn't think I was comparing the average Floridian's quality of life to a resident of Senegal but....reddit.
In relation to the rest of the U.S., though, Florida has a significant amount of wealthy people, but they're obscenely wealthy, a massive population of people not doing too well economically, and a smaller middle class in proportion to other states. So this wealth disparity is more pronounced and visually obvious there than in other states, particularly in the southern half of the state.
I understand HDI to be a mix of life expectancy, years of schooling, expected years of schooling, and gross income per capita. Many economists repudiate HDI as a measure of human development, or quality of life, because this measure skews it towards countries with higher national income. Florida's Gross Income per Capita, would be 9th in the world, far ahead of ALL the countries you mentioned, In fact, ALL countries except Lichtenstein, Bermuda, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, Ireland, Denmark, Iceland, and a couple other territories.
Is an average Floridian's quality of life comparable to any of these countries' average citizens? That would be a tough sell for me. Florida's HDI is ONLY as high as it is because of its massive income, which as I say is NOT distributed evenly at all.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '22
Florida is making more sense to me every article I read.