Florida is winning big league under a revitalized economy.
The tremendous milestone of 4.1 percent national GDP growth shows that the United States is on the move again, and Florida is leading the pack.
The state economy is booming, unemployment hovers around an all-time low, and millions of Floridians are now seeing more take home pay in their paychecks.
So how did we get here?
Florida small business owners attribute this surge to the GOP’s historic tax reform, which awarded millions of Floridians an immediate tax break after it was signed into law.
A great case study example of how the historic tax cuts are delivering direct benefits to Floridians is Dina Rubio. Dina is a local restaurant owner in West Palm Beach, who said the tax cuts have cleared a path for business expansion that will allow her to hire more employees. She has an exuberance about the future of her business that was lacking in prior years as the previously weak economy limited her growth.
Overall, businesses in the state have expanded hiring, raised hourly wages, and provided bonuses to thousands of workers across the state. Despite the destruction of Hurricane Irma, Florida still added nearly 200,000 jobs in 2017 alone, and the state’s overall unemployment rate is at the lowest level in over a decade.
The combination of tax relief and the expanding growth in the national GDP (the three-plus percent rate President Trump promised us back in 2017) has Florida’s economy moving full speed ahead.
For the first time ever, Florida’s gross domestic product just topped $1 trillion in July. If Florida were an independent state, it would have the 17th largest economy in the world — bigger than that of Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, and Argentina. And, according to the Florida Chamber Foundation, the state is adding about $2.74 billion to its GDP each and every day.
Florida even led the 10 largest states in job growth last year, and is also one of the top ten states in the country to start a business.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a recent opinion survey demonstrated that 61 percent of Florida voters 50 years and older approve of President Donald Trump’s job on the economy.
And the future looks even brighter. According to University of Central Florida’s Dr. Sean Snaith, Florida’s Real Gross State Product will expand by 3.7 percent in 2018 and 4.3 percent in 2019. Overall, Snaith expects average growth from 2017-2021 to be 0.7 percentage points higher than the national GDP growth.
Snaith said the recent progress isn’t by accident either. “This is really being driven by fundamentals … not just a fluke of an overheated economy.” That’s why the business sectors expected to have the strongest average job growth over the next three years include construction (6.3 percent) and professional services (5.2 percent).
This is further evidence of how Republican efforts to reinvigorate the economy are producing well-paying, no nonsense jobs throughout the great state of Florida.
The state is benefitting immensely from current economic leadership, and the good people of Florida should only expect more prosperity to come.
The future looks very bright for the Sunshine State.