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A Times Editorial
The Senate's budget proposal would force Gov. Bush to decide which is more important: adequate funding for education or tax breaks for special interests.
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 1, 2002
By focusing the money on a popular topic like education, the Florida Senate is attempting to buy a constituency of support for a billion-dollar tax increase . . .
-- Katie Baur, Gov. Jeb Bush's communications director
...What is more important: Tax breaks for special interests, or education? This is the choice that the Legislature has to make . . .
-- Sen. Don Sullivan, R-St. Petersburg
This is a tale not of two cities but of two states that improbably occupy identical territory inhabited by the same 16-million people.
In the one, the schools are flourishing, no one suffers for want of medical attention and there is no problem that cannot be solved by cutting taxes. One might call this the State of Oz, and a governor named Jeb Bush is the man behind the curtain.
In the other, demoralized teachers struggle in overcrowded classrooms where the true funding per pupil (even by the governor's numbers) has increased by less than two-tenths of 1 percent over the last three years, and desperately ill people are being culled from the assistance rolls. This is the State of Florida, where people of lesser rank but greater vision are asserting the leadership that the wizard has defaulted.
The dreary statistics that define Florida's abysmal standing in virtually every national comparison, from the inadequacy and unfairness of its tax base to its last place ranking in per capita spending for higher education, need not be detailed again here. They have become familiar to all informed citizens, many of whom, especially those who have children in school, did not need data to confirm what they already knew.
But the truth that has lately become apparent is how little any of that matters to the governor or his like-minded allies in the House of Representatives. In fact, nothing matters to them beyond a single-minded obsession with keeping taxes low and, if possible, cutting them yet again. The means to that end is a proposed budget that portrays stasis as growth, decay as progress and questionable assumptions as money in the bank.
The Senate, on the other hand, is a scene of heroic leadership. The Appropriations Committee has recommended a budget that would raise an estimated $878-million next year (and $1-billion a year after that) by repealing 16 of the state's least defensible sales tax exemptions. This proposal, devised by Republicans Don Sullivan of St. Petersburg and Jack Latvala of Palm Harbor, brilliantly assigns each tax exemption to a specific area of education funding. It frames the clearest of choices: tax-free charter fishing boats or slightly more money for the universities? Tax-free lobbyist retainers, or reduced class size in the public schools?
In part, that calls the bluff of Bush and the House, who in rejecting Senate President John McKay's tax reform plan said their minds were open to repealing some exemptions if it were done by law, rather than by constitutional amendment, and if some other taxes were cut in compensation. The need for money being vastly greater than the case for any tax cuts, the Sullivan-Latvala proposal properly ignores that part of the Bush-Feeney bluff.
But the House can't just vote this down and call it forgotten as it did with McKay's tax reform. At some point before June 30, the two chambers must agree on a budget. Whether the governor and the House like it or not, the Senate initiative will be on the conference table. Whether the governor and the House like it or not, education is a popular topic, and it deserves that $1-billion tax increase.