Fla. Legislature needs to rethink its rethinking

Don’t let anybody fool you.
What is happening in over the budget in the state Legislature is not simply about bringing revenues and expenses into balance.
Our lawmakers and political leaders are rethinking government, retooling it and re-engineering.
I’m not sure exactly what that means – except that perhaps it means that raising taxes on the cancer-causing cigarettes that place a burden on our health-care system is bad and cutting funding for our centers of research known as universities is good.
Anyway, whatever they mean exactly, those terms keep coming up in my conversations with people in government and those who know them best: lobbyists.
The problem is there needs to be a bigger conversation first, before we re-engineer. That way everyone, including the people to whom the government is supposed to belong, gets a say in the outcome.
Let’s take higher education as an example.
If the Legislature wants to rethink, retool and re-engineer what it looks like by putting fewer public dollars into it, then it needs to rethink, retool and re-engineer its own control of it. Meaning, the state needs to give up its say over tuition and fees and the programs the colleges and universities offer.
If you want public education and government to work as businesses, by all means, but then get out of the way.
Otherwise, with all due respect to the rethinkers, retoolers and re-engineerers, all you are doing is dismantling.
And you are being deceitful in the process.
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