Hear me out. Just give me 2 minutes to explain.

In the next 20 to 30 years the state of Florida will experience a deep local recession (think Detroit). The Baby Boomers who bought up all those retirement villages will start to die off. Also, it’s becoming prohibitively expensive to get a decent house due to the insurance premiums. The real estate market will come into significant overhead supply. The decline in population will reduce sales tax receipts, cut retail spending, and economic growth will slow. Seeing this, people will leave, exacerbating the situation.

The tourism industry won’t save them. With newer (and closer) developments throughout the world being built, Orlando’s strong growth will slow. When it’s cheaper and more fun to go to Dubai for a week, Europeans will stop showing up.

It just keeps coming: the educational system is not graduating good workers, and businesses will have less of incentive to bring their business to the state. In the long term, the state will run out of water.

And the voters don’t notice the problem. They just put in a constitutional amendment to reduce property taxes, which will hurt the state in terms of tax receipts when the housing crash finally ends. This November, they are looking to cut state taxes to schools by a significant amount. Unless we privatize the Florida school system, this will be a bad move.

The solution is offshore drilling.

Offshore Drilling will save the environment. By leasing the land to the oil/nat-gas companies and taxing their profits, you can use that money for 3 major things:

Environmental Insurance in case of a disaster Tax breaks for green energy (solar and tidal, not wind) Development of a high-speed rail system

You will also get an increase in jobs. You could also use the tax receipts to subsidize household insurance. We need a combination of solar-heat and desalinization plants to get the water we need to the state.

The solutions to the energy crisis must not only come from long-term renewable energy; it must be subsidized by the energy that is immediately available to the country.