If you think the economy booming in Florida has anything to do with Desantis, you're an idiot. The only thing his policies have done is drive away over a billion dollars of investment from Disney. The hotel and hospitality industry is down 20% just since last year. Things have nose dived this year, but his authoritarian grip on state agencies have them pumping the numbers to keep it down while he runs for President. You can't even get insurance for the hurricanes anymore. My cousin is an agent in high-end real estate out of Miami (>$5mil properties) and he's moving because the market is dropping dramatically - nobody wants to put up with so many hurricanes. Then there's the fact you've got a climate-change denier doing nothing to harden the infrastructure in Florida. It's nuts.

"Omitted from the public debate about DeSantis’s policies is almost any discussion of his actual record of governance—what exactly he has delivered to the citizens of his state, especially those without seven-figure incomes and lush investment portfolios.

Even a cursory dip into the statistics of social and economic well-being reveals that Florida falls short in almost any measure that matters to the lives of its citizens. More than four years into the DeSantis governorship, Florida continues to languish toward the bottom of state rankings assessing the quality of health care, school funding, long-term elder care, and other areas key to a successful society.

Florida may be the place where “woke goes to die”—as DeSantis is fond of saying—but it is also where teachers’ salaries are among the lowest in the nation, unemployment benefits are stingier than in any other state, and wage theft flourishes with little interference from the DeSantis administration. In 2021, DeSantis campaigned against a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage, which had been stuck at $8.65 an hour. Under DeSantis’s watch, the Sunshine State has not exactly been a workers’ paradise.

Read More: Why “Woke” Is A Convenient Republican Dog Whistle

DeSantis weaponizes the cultural wars to distract attention from the core missions of his governorship, which is to starve programs geared toward bettering the lives of ordinary citizens so he can maintain low taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Florida is the ideal haven for privileged Americans who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes. It has no income tax for individuals, and its corporate tax rate of 5.5% is among the lowest in the nation. An investigation by the Orlando Sentinel in late 2019 revealed the startling fact that 99% of Florida’s companies paid no corporate income tax, abetted by tax-avoidance schemes and state officials who gave a low priority to enforcing tax laws."

-Time Magazine, late March 2023