Speaking to conservative state legislators gathered nationally, Gov. Ron DeSantis decried a nation in “decline” as he welcomed them to “the Free State of Florida” and saluted their efforts to combat that.
“It is Republican-controlled state houses across the country where big wins are being done on behalf of freedom,” Mr. DeSantis told the American Legislators Exchange Council at its 50th annual meeting in Orlando on July 26.
According to its website, the council is a voluntary nonpartisan organization of state legislators dedicated to limited government, free markets, and federalism. About a quarter of the nation’s state legislators belong to it, representing about 60 million Americans.
“This country is in a state of decline: economic decline, military decline, cultural decline,” Mr. DeSantis said. “And if we look at states that are governed by leftist politicians wielding leftist ideology, those states are symptomatic of the larger decline in our country. And I can cite you statistics, but all you have to do is look at how people are voting with their feet.”
“Those states that impose those anti-freedom policies are hemorrhaging businesses, hemorrhaging residents and they’re hemorrhaging wealth,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We see crime going through the roof and many of the urban centers in these areas and their education systems have declined dramatically as those policies have taken hold more and more.”
“That decline is a choice,” Mr. DeSantis said, adding that it isn’t inevitable. He contrasted those states with states like Florida and other successful ones “where the debate is about the future of our country.”
“It’s a choice we as Americans will be making in the ensuing months and years. I believe that Florida shows the way to reverse our nation’s decline, restore sanity to our society, and usher into this country a new birth of freedom.”
Mr. DeSantis noted some of the state’s accomplishments under his leadership. It has retired $400 million in debt, saving the taxpayer $25 million in interest payments.
“Don’t you wish Washington was doing something like that?”he asked the audience.
The state of Florida leads in business formation and economic growth, and has the lowest unemployment rate among large states—thanks in part to its stay-open policies during the COVID pandemic, the second-term governor said. The state legislature passed $2.7 billion in new tax relief in this year’s legislative session. With no state income tax, the state has one of the nation’s lowest per capita tax burdens.
Mr. DeSantis blamed the Biden administration’s economic policies—and implicitly those of President Joe Biden’s predecessor and Mr. DeSantis’s campaign rival, Donald Trump—for leading to the marked inflation of the last few years.
“Why is this happening? Because governments starting in March of 2020 with the COVID and the Fauci lockdowns, printed and spent trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars,” he said. “I think it’s been said that there’s nothing more expensive than free money.”
High inflation created “tepid” economic growth, which may soon turn negative, he said. And high-interest rates are making it difficult for people to afford a house.
Increases in home prices—significant in Florida with all the demand from people moving in—and higher interest rates means that people may be paying double each month compared to what they would have for the same house four years ago, Mr. DeSantis said.
He blamed the Federal Reserve for much of it, due to its policies of “quantitative easing.” He said this may benefit the wealthy, “but it has not produced results for people who are working or middle class.”
“Their job at the Fed should simply be to maintain stable prices, not to be an economic central planner—not to worry about social issues or climate change or any of that stuff,” he said, adding that he believes the Federal Reserve “dropped the ball” by printing too much money and again, by deeming the inflation “transitory” when it was obviously more significant.
“Milton Friedman said when you start going on spending and borrowing binges, you’re gonna get inflation 18 to 20 months later, and that’s exactly what happened. And the Fed acted like that no longer applied.”
The nation needs strong economic growth if it hopes to remain stronger than China, he said. China is the first global competitor the United States has had as economically powerful as it is and may surpass us, Mr. DeSantis said.
“Our adversarial relationship with China is a tough problem because of the economic dependence that has developed in this country,” he said, adding that during the pandemic, “almost everything we needed was made in China.”
“We’ve never had a peer competitor in any of our lifetimes that had a bigger and stronger economy than we did. When you look at the Soviet Union, that was primarily an ideological confrontation. Yes, military in the sense of the nuclear standoff, but their economy was a pittance compared to the American economy. We now have a competitor that could potentially surpass us and so we can’t let that happen.”
That means making more goods in the United States rather than “subcontracting out” key parts of the economy to our top threat and top adversary, Mr. DeSantis said.
The governor worked his way back to commenting on his own state, where his policies, he said, have created the kind of growth the entire nation could use.
He highlighted Florida’s educational achievements, this year being labeled the top-ranked state in education by the U.S. News and World Report in its first post-pandemic scores and passing a bill to create universal school choice this spring. Competition with private and charter schools and homeschooling has pushed public schools to do better, he added. Three-quarters of children in Miami-Dade County don’t attend their neighborhood public school.
The state’s charter school population of 363,000 students, disproportionately low-income and minority, would rank with the top states nationally in educational performance, he said.
Mr. DeSantis criticized the Biden administration’s policies for everything from cutting the nation’s energy supplies to planning to institute a central bank digital currency—a national cryptocurrency banned by the Florida Legislature this spring.
As he talked about schools and his efforts to help restore parental control over the teaching of sexuality, Mr. DeSantis needled Mr. Biden, who was quoted in a “Pride Month” video clip released by the White House as saying, “These are our kids. These are our neighbors. Not somebody else’s kids. They’re all our kids.”
“You know, that’s what he means,” Mr. DeSantis said. “So they’re not all our [the government’s] kids. They’re your kids ... and our school system doesn’t exist to supersede the rights of parents.”
Mr. DeSantis pushed back on the notion that Florida is pushing “book bans”—a term that he said the left has tried to “demagogue.”
The state has restored parents’ right to know what’s being taught in their child’s school, he said.
“And unfortunately, there are things that are totally inappropriate that are being put particularly in these early grades, things that are pornographic, for example. Now, if you walked into a fourth-grade classroom and someone was playing an X-rated movie, you would take that movie out, and that would not be appropriate. No one would say that you’ve banned that move from society.
“So when they tried to do ‘book ban,’ that’s a hoax. Nothing’s being banned in Florida. You can do whatever you want as an adult, but to inject that into a fourth-grade classroom is wrong,” he said.
“Adult material shouldn’t be in a fourth-grade classroom. You want to look at adult material, go watch Hunter Biden’s laptop for all I care, but don’t do it to our kids.”
