To save money, Florida considers getting rid of children

From the Miami Herald

By Fred Grimm

Pondering the budget Gov. Scott sent to the Legislature, I’m overcome with something similar to the sentiment suffered by adults in the lobby of Disney World’s Animal Kingdom Lodge.

One admires the soaring thatched ceiling, huge wooden beams, hard-carved furnishings, faux African artifacts and the wild (or at least wildish) animals roaming the grounds, and lament that this could be one of the great hotels.

Except for all the damn, noisy kids.

Same with Florida. Children, in addition to a propensity to whoop in restaurants, pee in swimming pools and clog up the lines at Expedition Everest, have become Florida’s great budget busters. No other segment of the state population, with a possible exception of Tallahassee’s cadre of lobbyists, suck so much out of our faltering state economy.

Gov. Scott has no choice, really, but to ban the little parasites.

These miniature socialists demand huge outlays of public revenue against their piddling contributions. How much tax does Florida collect from sales of Nerf Vortex Nitron Blasters or Lalaloopsy SillyHair Dolls against the $17.5 billion the governor has budgeted next fiscal year for education?

The American Federation of Immigration Reform estimates that illegal immigrants cost Florida about $3.8 billion a year in medical, education and incarceration costs. But that’s chump change compared to the $20.3 billion we fritter away on Medicaid, most of which goes to whiny kids.

Scott wants to hack a couple of billion out of the Medicaid budget. That should cull the herd. But the governor also wants to take a billion of that savings and tack it onto the education budget, bringing Florida’s per pupil outlay to $6,372 a student. That would still be one of the lower per capita spending rates in the nation, but for true fiscal conservatives, that’s just waste, considering the employment opportunities awaiting youngsters in the Florida workforce. How much schooling does a kid need to deal blackjack?

Besides, an outright ban means the governor could fulfill the ultimate Republican fantasy and fire the state’s public school teachers en masse.

Get rid of the kids and save on playgrounds and children’s museums and whatever Florida spends enforcing the new state law banning sagging pants. Without children, Disney World, the state’s most influential opponent of bigtime gambling, becomes the world’s hottest casino.

Just ban them. At least ban the poor and middle class from burdening Florida with their uneconomical offspring. Jonathan Swift suggested in his 1729 A Modest Proposal that the Irish solve their economic problems by selling their children to the wealthy to consume “as a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.’’

In Tallahassee, we could smother the brats in a mango salsa. Serve ‘em up as the early bird specials for budget-minded legislators.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/01/09/2581576/floridas-budget-solution-ban-the.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy