During a single week this month, she said, the state took in a half-billion dollars in tax revenue and wrote checks totaling $1.3 billion, a recipe for fiscal disaster.

"We can't rely anymore on attracting fixed-income retirees from up north and selling them cheap land," Sink said. "Those days are over."

"Hopefully, this is a wake-up call for the state of Florida," said Frank Nero, president of the Beacon Council, Miami-Dade's economic development organization. "We can no longer be dependent on population growth as the base of our economy."

Nero predicted that regions of Florida that have more diversified economies, such as South and Central Florida, will rebound faster than those that don't, like Southwest Florida, where Lee County has the highest housing foreclosure rate in the country.

Just as the state's growth-based economy now seems lopsided, Florida's revenue model also looks wildly out of sync with the times.

The state clings to a decades-old dependence on a sales tax applied only to goods like cars, furniture and appliances. Left untaxed are Internet sales and such items as bottled water and charter fishing-boat excursions.

The idea of a state income tax remains taboo, both in the state Constitution and in the psyche of most Floridians.

"It's obvious that if we don't find new sources of revenue, the existing revenue sources are going to have to go higher," said John Ramil, chief operating officer of TECO Energy and president of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce Committee of 100.

Nowhere are the ups and downs in Florida's economic roller coaster more apparent than in Port St. Lucie, a city of 166,000 whose motto is "A City for All Ages." In January 2002, while most of Florida was still reeling from the recession brought on by the 9/11 attacks, Port St. Lucie was bustling. Jobs increased by 4 percent. Wages were up by 11 percent. Home construction soared.

Then-Mayor Bob Minsky's biggest worry was traffic, and the head of the city's Economic Development Council held a presentation for local developers titled "What recession?"

The New York Times called it the "fastest growing economy" in the fastest growing state.

Fueled by low home prices that lured people up the coast from heavily congested, high-cost South Florida, the city's population had soared by 133 percent by last year.

Fast-forward to this year: New construction is down by 70 percent, unemployment is at 10 percent, and one in every 113 homes are in foreclosure.

Now, no region of the state has escaped the downturn. By the time the national recession hit this fall, Florida was already a year into it. The construction industry felt it first, with 79,000 jobs lost. By last month, unemployment had reached every sector, and 156,200 Floridians had lost their jobs in a year. A once robust housing market has a record inventory of 300,000 unsold homes, six times the normal average of 50,000.

The credit crisis has spread from home mortgages to delinquencies on car loans and credit cards, said Amy Baker, the state's chief economist and director of the Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research.

Until the excess inventory goes away, Baker said, "we're looking at probably 15 months before things improve."

But they will, she said. "This may be our life for the next 18 months to two years, but after that, things will return. We will have population growth, and all the things that made Florida attractive to the baby-boomers before are still going to be here."

For some, things will get worse before they get better. About 410,000 homeowners are vulnerable to the worsening economy and the challenge of being able to keep their homes, Baker said. For years, Florida had a homeownership rate of 66 percent, close to the national average, but during the housing boom, that rate increased to 72 percent, and those new homeowners are most at risk.