Voters Deserve Better

There’s an old adage about elections that people get the leaders they deserve, but this time around voters deserve better.

Less than a month away from the midterm election that will select local, state and congressional representatives we are bombarded with nothing but negative attack ads on TV and debates about why not to vote for the other candidate. Alas, there is precious little being said about what candidates will do in terms of positive action and initiatives to make our lives better.

Here in Florida Democrats, Republicans and, yes, even the darlings of the Tea Party appear to be petty hate mongers. Are all the candidates liars and thieves? Probably not, but that’s all we hear, charges and countercharges, insults and denials and vague generalities regarding the critical issues that are important to us all.

Unemployment is still the single most important concern in Florida and across much of the nation, but what specifically can you refer to as a plan to create jobs, beyond the broad strokes of education and re-training for the industries of America’s new economic reality, whatever that is.

There is only one candidate for elective office that I’ve heard at any level in Florida who has articulated the key to creating jobs. Bill Segal got it right when he said in a recent televised debate that he’d fly anywhere in the world to bring jobs to Orange county. He’s the Democrat running for mayor of the county.

That’s the formula for success. You go to the companies with the highest potential for employing people and explain why they’ll make more money operating in your town. Teodoro Moscoso was the pre-eminent creator of jobs, who first wrote the book on the process that served as the model for developing countries. He was the architect and chief engineer of Puerto Rico’s highly successful Operation Bootstrap industrialization program in the 1960s and 70s, responsible for attracting the jobs that lifted the island out of poverty.

Moscoso knocked on the doors of every boardroom he found to convince corporate decision-makers that they were better off making their widgets under the American flag in Puerto Rico. As a result, many major pharmaceutical and technology companies still produce their high value-added products on the island, even though the tax exemption that originally lured them there has long gone. While there are now fewer jobs in more efficient plants, the core of skilled, technology jobs still on the island are the one ray of hope in an otherwise dysfunctional economy.

That was Moscoso’s legacy to the people of Puerto Rico. If the candidates in Florida and elsewhere in the US of A want our votes, they should take a page from the economic development chapter he wrote and tell us how they will open the doors to the current corporate world to create employment opportunities.

And, That’s That…