Lotto sales are way up, surpassing $4 Billion in fiscal 2011. This is expected in a down market. Lotto, cigarettes and beer. That's what a nervous mass of people who are about to lose their damn jobs buy. It's no great mystery.
Nevermind logic, reason, and even empirical evidence. A couple of months ago, major papers began shilling for the garbage story that our lotto system was broken and so, we need to revamp the lotto-funded Bright Futures Scholars Program or get rid of it. As in YESTERDAY! Fire drill! Fire drill! Everybody panic! KILL KILL KILL, SLASH SLASH!
Witness this little gem April 3, in the Miami Herald. Without the benefit of the first shred of data, the writer of this piece of awful suggested that lotto sales were flat. And so, as night follows day, we must must must (don't you get it? We MUST) scrap the Bright Futures Scholars program. Or tweak it, to make sure it's "going to the right people". i.e. the poorest of the poor, where apparently there are no scholarships. Of course the contract entered into between students and state has long been a simple one. You do the work, you get the grades, you get the scholarship. Easy.
Here is another piece of dog-vomit from Miami Herald on the subject that alleges "lotto proceeds have not kept pace" with needs of the scholarship fund. Again, no evidence in the form of those wonderful things called facts and figures to support this assertion.
Lynn, chairs the higher education appropriations subcommittee. In March, you may recall Lynn suggested that Florida's Prepaid College Plan - this isn't a "handout" either! This is where people 'prepay' into a tuition fund!! - be suspended. Drawing from a vast reservoiur of anti-knowledge, she postulated that the program may become insolvent since it was tied to the stock market. Only, dundering Dora didn't do the first bit of research on the matter before opening her gob, because IT ISN'T!! AT ALL! Not one red cent is attached to the stock market!!! No, No, no.
"Oh fidddle de dee," said she and promptly coitus interrupted her attempted fornication of the public, when this rock of salience was thrown at her iron-cast head. Leave it to a garden-clubbing, Lincoln Day Dining, Maritini Party, silver haired, intolerant former beauty queen with an "I hate you" smile, to toss this off so casually without offering the first explanation for her own stupidity. AND DID WE MENTION SHE CHAIRS higher education APPROPRIATIONS subcommittee?
Well don't you know nasty pants is going after Bright Futures now. Under the guise of protecting it, the idea would be to increase the requirements. And of course, she will be back next year to bump those up again. All these changes of course, without the first shred of evidence that they are necessary.
As we speak, and in response to the agenda-driven, self-derived story of Bright Futures should be curbed, tabled, tweak, screwed, studies are now being undertaken to "get to the bottom" of the question "does Bright Futures work?"
Work? Define "work" i.e. to function properly? They can't and they won't. Because it isn't about "working". This is about class warfare. It's about looting the lotto. Soon to be called The Florida LOOTO. Guess who will do the looting? The Florida Legislature and Rick Scott.
Rick Scott and the legislature pulled two, quick, crisis managment fast ones on the students of Florida with the administration of this program. They reduced the pay-out per credit hour from $120 to $108. Then they went "oh, but wait, we haven't hurt the students and parents of Florida enough with that move. We need to find another rusty oyster fork to stick in their eye." And so they raised the cost of state tuition.
You pay your water bill every month. Without fail. "No no. Not good enough. To penalize you for doing that, we will cut the flow rate in half, and triple the price of the water. There. How's that feel? Oh, we also had the meter reader poison your dog while he was in your yard. M'kay?"
The deal was, a program designed to send the MAXIMUM through-put possible TO THE STUDENTS OF FLORIDA. This is WHY we voted on having a lotto in the state in the first place. "Pink Slip" Rick might not recall this because he was too busy bilking seniors and veterans benefits from Tricare and Medicare when all this happened. But, I was living here when Lotto was voted on. And the concern then was, technically lotto is gambling and we had laws against it. Legislators agreed that in this one special case, when the aim was to serve the students and hard-working families of Florida - a "right to fire your ass anytime they feel like it" state - with a program that offered a "bright future" to those willing, able and motivated students WHO WORKED FOR IT.
No no. You're missing the point. The point of Ricky-World, is to shut off opportunities of those same hard working familes to send their kids to college, and to stamp out motivation in public education, to kill initiative and drive of young enterprising students in public schools who might just work themselves out of the grind their parents spent their whole lives just to keep their heads above water here, while sending their kids to school, athletic events, and providing an enriching environment where HOMEWORK and STUDY were encouraged.
Remember THIS PROGRAM IS FUNDED BY LOTTO MONEY. It isn't a HAND-OUT from TAXES as the popular myth goes.
Now, you have to really look at it: Lotto sales go up! But they've cut the supply of the money to the muscle all of it was supposed to go to. They provide a third twist to the valve by upping the requirements. They provided not one shred of data that lotto funding was tight in the first place, that lotto sales were down. Once again! It's not tied to revenue from taxes! It's tied to people trying something, hell, ANYTHING, to save themselves financially from this mess republicans and greed heads on Wall Street created in the first place!
No. Not one shred of data that lotto wasn't working and now we have evidence that the exact opposite is true.
So, where is that extra money from these shaving going to go? What will that money be doing now that it ISN'T being directed to the very place it was designed to go in the first place?
Who knows? And the bought-and-paid-for media isn't going to ask.
In sum, we have bald-faced evidence that this program of plundering the lotto is nothing more than another example of attacking and killing the hopes and dreams of middle and poorer economic class working Floridians, and robbing the coffers of the state for whatever nefarious purposes these cretinous leeches - naming names now: Rick Scott, Dean Cannon, Mikey Haridopolos, John Thrasher, Evelyn Lynn - deem fit.
A criminal corporate cabal is in control of your government here in Florida. Their mission is to kill the hopes of your children, enrich themselves while driving as many of us from the state as possible.
You are to be replaced with mechanical golf ball washers, greens, and fairways. You and your children are no longer welcome here. Personae non gratti. You're no longer deemed worthy to stand in your own state.
Bright Futures Must die, so that the rich can plunder our lucrative state lotto.
Now what the hell are you going to do about it?
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