Last week, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, and the Florida Democratic Party’s anointed choice to replace Governor Charlie Crist, Alex Sink, had a sit-down with some small business owners to discuss how they can prosper in this tough economic climate. I don’t support Alex Sink. I support Farid Khavari. The reason I’m including this article about Alex Sink is that it does show you how ill-equipped and unprepared she is to help small business and Florida’s economy.

She stressed the need for small businesses to be able to get loans for their businesses. Unfortunately, there were no new ideas from her, just more of the same bailout mentality.

And when asked about Dr. Farid Khavari’s plan for a State bank, she flat-out ignored his existence and said we have plenty of banks already, including national and international ones. And haven’t they done so well for us?

Hear her Q&A at this LINK.

What Alex Sink is talking about amounts to just more smoke and mirrors. In response to Sink’s confidence in the federal solution and big banks, Khavari spokesperson Bob Waterstripe called her out for a debate and said this . . .

Sink hears businesspeople tell her they can’t get capital/credit. Then, when asked about the Khavari plan including a state bank, she says we have plenty of banks and they can meet the needs of business. FL’s share of $30 bln TARP money is about 2 bln, $100 per FL citizen. This will have no impact, at best a few thousand jobs. We need a MILLION.

In fact, $2 billion is almost 4 times LESS than the banks made in overdraft charges in FL last year. Over a MILLION are unemployed in FL and over 800,000 FL homes in foreclosure. Khavari has a plan to create a million FL jobs without subsidies and the proposed state bank will stabilize and rejuvenate the housing market as well as the entire economy, saving $100s of $1000s per family.

Sink declines to even acknowledge Khavari? No surprise; she won’t even answer a straight question on anything. As CFO she stood by while $10s of BILLIONS were lost by the SBA on phony deals. Crist, McCollum and Sink, as the 3 trustees, met twice a month for 15 minutes to oversee the SBA (per Crist, St. Pete Times). Most of us take more time than that on our household bills. Sink’s well-publicized Blackberry crackdown nets $250K, enough to pay the interest on $50 billion for about 40 minutes. YAY! Now she’s counting paper clips. You can bet the cost of counting them is 200x the cost of the paperclips.

Here is a little advice to Ms. Sink: Take care of the tens of billions, and the paperclips can take care of themselves. What about a debate between Sink and Khavari with Rob Lorie as moderator?

Links: Sink at the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce

Aside from losing $60 billion of Floridians’ pensions (along with Crist and McCollum), she has a record in BIG BANKING too.