People and companies moved to Florida to escape New York's high taxes, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo still wants to make them pay for his state's financial issues amid the coronavirus pandemic, Sen. Rick Scott said Thursday. Scott says he'll fight to keep that from happening.
"I got elected governor when Cuomo got elected governor," the Florida Republican said on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "People got fed up with New York because the taxes were so high, regulations were so high."
But Cuomo "just wasted money year after year," said Scott. "He'd never make tough choices that you have to make in business, that families have to make. We have to live within our means. Not Andrew Cuomo, he just borrowed money every year. He'd get mad at me because I'd recruit companies to come to my state … now he says all those people who moved to Florida, we still want them to pay off New York's budget problems. I'm going to fight this. It is wrong for Floridians to have to pay for California's, Illinois', or New York's excesses, that's wrong."
New York claims to give more money to the federal government than it gets, but Scott said instead, Cuomo "takes money constantly."
"In the last nine years, he increased his budget by $570,000 per new person, and what did Florida do? $10,000," said Scott. "He can't live within his means, and he wants all the rest of us to pay for it."
Scott also commented on the weekly job loss report released Thursday morning, which shows that initial claims for state unemployment benefits totaled a seasonally adjusted 2.438 million for the week ending May 16.
"The biggest thing we can do is get this economy open," said Scott. "People want to get back to a normal life, they want to get back to their jobs. Let them do it."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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