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A Times Editorial
Gov. Jeb Bush asserts that the average Floridian believes our tax structure is fundamentally sound. If that's so, why doesn't Bush let them vote on it?
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 12, 2002
If you believe, as some people do, that the Earth is flat or that it rests on the back of a giant tortoise, no wealth of evidence, logic or persuasion will change your mind. Similarly, nothing will ever convert Gov. Jeb Bush to the belief that Florida needs tax reform.
Ending the suspense, he came out strongly against the Senate-passed proposal last week. The issue is now larger than just that plan. Though Bush expressed some cogent criticisms of the Senate's approach, he made it clear from the outset that no matter what the details, he would find the devil in the purpose. In his mind, Florida has all the taxes it will ever need -- indeed more than enough. The sales tax is just fine. The Constitution should be amended neither to reform nor raise taxes but to further restrict state spending.
In that respect, he hasn't changed even minutely from the inexperienced ideologue of his first campaign, eight years ago, when he pledged his support to a constitutional amendment that would have required voter approval for any tax raised anywhere in Florida. That extreme edge was missing from his next campaign, which he won. But if voter approval for all taxes was a good idea in 1994, why is it not a good idea now to let voters approve or disapprove the tax reform proposal put forth by Senate President John McKay?
One reason Bush might not think so is that he is in hock to the lobbies that massively oppose the Senate plan. Another is that he is joined at the hip to House Speaker Tom Feeney, who shares his libertarian attitudes on fiscal policy. But the paramount reason is this: To concede the need for any tax reform would give the lie to every claim he makes in support of his re-election. It would be to admit that the public schools are overcrowded and falling behind, that university campuses are turning shabby from neglect, and that Florida has shamefully turned its back on its troubled children, whose probation supervisors have been sacked in favor of eventually hiring more jailers. To recognize that Florida needs more money from a broader tax base, as McKay urges, is to confess that the tax base is too weak, now and for the future.
In his letter to McKay and Feeney, Bush adopted whole the arguments of other McKay detractors that taxes are growing in step with the economy. Yet these arguments conflict with last week's announcement by Florida TaxWatch (which also opposes the Senate plan) that state taxes as a percent of personal income are now lower than in 1980. In this key measure of taxing effort, Florida ranks only 45th in the nation. Florida ranks higher than the national average, however, in the per capita local property tax burden. This is the direct fault, as McKay has been saying, of the state's abandoning responsibilities that then devolve on local taxpayers.
The governor asserted as fact -- but without documentation -- that "average Floridians . . . believe our tax structure is fundamentally sound." If so, why not let them vote?
On the same day, several hundred well-informed Floridians began the annual meeting, at Gainesville, of the Reubin O'D. Askew Institute on Politics and Society. When it ended Saturday, they expressed a consensus that tax reform should be an "urgent" priority for Florida. Though the statement favored no particular method, it agreed, as has the Senate, that the base should be broader.
The participants included educators, civic, business and charitable leaders, city and county officials and a few journalists, but only one legislator. They came in large part from among the alumni of Leadership Florida, which works quietly and without publicity to educate Floridians on the problems and promises of their state. On a splendid late winter weekend, with the lobbying corps occupied elsewhere and the television propaganda tuned out, the real voice of Florida, so seldom heard in Tallahassee, rang out loud and clear