The Cold Hard Facts of our economy

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Guest Blogger
In Saturday’s ( 3/16/13) Palm Beach Post there is an article on biotech company leaving PB county.

The hardest thing about any start-up company is starting up-- it takes a lot of money that most do not have so when you are a biotech start up you need a sucker to give you free money. And that sucker was all of us in south Florida. We have given them free tax payer money to get them started ( not to mention the Federal grant money that they also received which is of course tax payer money too), put in infrastructure and buildings that our regular economy has no use for and now we are holding the bag for years to come.

In Florida there are 3 sectors and only 3 sectors for business: Agriculture , Tourism , and Housing construction. We have killed Agriculture by de-mucking all the good farm land on the coast (the only place that you can farm year around, east of congress to the coast, it gets too cold west of congress in winter) to over building of houses. We just don't have enough small farming to help the economy.

Tourism is not what it used to be any more. Tourist season has gotten shorter and shorter over the years for a lot of reasons, and by over building all over the state of Florida, we are now competing with ourselves (Florida has the longest sea shore area of the country-- people don't have to come to Lake Worth or Palm Beach County to get good beaches) and our taxes have gone up so much that most people just don't want to come here anymore. We just don't have enough tourism to help the economy.

We have killed construction by over building to the point that we will not need much going forward for a long time. Not to mention that the financial sector has screwed us by over lending on construction that is not worth much anymore and most are up-side down.

The housing rental bubble is on now and when the hedge fund guys and all the smaller speculators finally realize that the rental business is not much good (unemployed and $9 / $10 dollars an hour just will not cut it to pay rent), they will dump all those properties because they paid cash and now own the deeds. They will sell at a loss just to get out and home prices will go down again. We will not get enough new construction to help the economy.

And now all we have is service work at $9.00 to $10.00 an hour to get by. It will not be enough to help the economy. We will never be Silicon Valley here. It is anchored very well on the west coast of the country where it's closer to Asia where most of the action is for a good while yet, but we are left holding the bag on all the speculation that we have done.

Cesar Figueroa
Lake Worth