House Speaker Daniel Perez is telling a national audience that Sen. Rick Scott had a record in job creation as Governor that state-level politicians in the Ron DeSantis era aren’t matching.
“When you talk about Rick Scott and the amount of jobs that he brought into the state, that was unprecedented. We haven’t seen it since. As a matter of fact, right now, our unemployment rate is going up in the state of Florida. That never happened to Rick Scott,” the Miami Republican said on Tuesday’s “Clay and Buck.“
Indeed, Scott’s single-minded focus on jobs was a feature of his time as Governor from 2011 to 2019.
By the time he left office, the unemployment rate had fallen from nearly 11% when he was inaugurated to 3.3%, a point below the national average. 1.7 million jobs were created when he was Governor, and the state had a 3.3% job growth rate at the end.
Meanwhile, as DeSantis’ time in office approaches an end, joblessness is climbing. The unemployment rate of 4.7% is higher than the national average of 4.3%.
Scott has lamented the recent trajectory.
“This is concerning. Florida’s jobs numbers continue to get worse. Unemployment shot up to 4.7% — higher than the national average. Florida lost almost 38K jobs year over year in March,” Scott posted to social media Friday.
“Florida’s unemployment rate is ABOVE the national average and it’s only GROWING. The latest state jobs numbers show we lost over 43k jobs all in critical industries. Florida had one of the worst performing job markets over the past year. Our state needs to stay focused on adding private sector jobs and driving down cost of living — just like President (Donald) Trump is trying to do across the country,” he posted last month to X.
“Higher costs of living in Florida are driving people away from the state. That’s bad for Floridians, bad for business, and bad for everyone. This, on the heels of last month’s jobs numbers, is incredibly discouraging,” Scott posted also in April, responding to a Wall Street Journal article.
“If you don’t have a growing job economy, then your revenues don’t grow. And so that makes it harder. When your revenue’s growing, it’s a lot easier to reduce your taxes, which is what I was able to do. We grew 1.7 million jobs when I was Governor. So what that did was, we got more revenues. And every year revenues came in, I cut more and more taxes, and that’s one thing the state needs to do,” Scott said during an interview with WFLA’s Ryan Gorman in January.
A legislative briefing from the Office of Economic and Demographic Research (EDR) regarding the state’s long-term economic outlook last year offered further clarity as to the long-term impact of evaporating employment opportunities.
Job creation is expected to be just above 1% per year, with an increasingly older population creating further stresses on the state.
An analysis from Florida TaxWatch further details a bleak forecast. The report projects Florida’s unemployment rate increasing from 3.9% in 2025 to a peak of 4.4% in 2027, before stabilizing around 4% by 2035.
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