(The Center Square) — Gov. Ron DeSantis officially opened Florida’s legislative session Tuesday with his annual State of the State address.
“We are as a country in the midst of a great upheaval, and we see this throughout the land,” said DeSantis, a GOP presidential candidate. “Under the current administration in Washington, homelessness is at record levels, 62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and the federal budget deficit is expected to hit $2 trillion this year.”
DeSantis added that more than 8 million illegal aliens have entered the United States across the southern border in the past three years alone and deaths due to fentanyl have reached record levels.
“Cities throughout the land have decayed,” DeSantis said. “Washington D.C. is experiencing its deadliest year in more than two decades, and San Francisco has fallen into a doom loop whereby crime, homelessness and drug abuse have eviscerated the quality of life in the city.”
DeSantis noted that soft-on-crime policies have devastated public safety in major cities like Chicago, further noting that a recent Stanford University study shows that businesses are leaving large metropolitans and blue states like California.
“Florida now has millions more residents than New York state, yet New York’s budget is twice the size of ours here in Florida,” DeSantis said. “They have a $4.3 billion deficit. We now have more manufacturing jobs than New York and have added twice as many jobs as New York in the past year, and our unemployment rate is close to 50% lower than that of New York.”
DeSantis pointed out that the choices made by Florida lawmakers have produced top results in the U.S. and the failures in other states have occurred because those elected officials put ideology over sound policy.
“In this time of choosing, the state of Florida has chosen well,” DeSantis said. “We have chosen facts over fear, we have chosen education over indoctrination, we have chosen law and order over rioting and disorder. We have chosen fiscal responsibility over debt.”
DeSantis noted that Florida has earned top rankings for education, education freedom, parental involvement in education, talent development, public higher education, business formation, GDP growth amongst large states and domestic in-migration for the third consecutive year.
