GOP leaders learning that anti-tax ideal won't work
By MARY JO MELONE
Published June 1, 2003
"I have voted for my last budget in the state of Florida that's put together with Band-Aids and paper clips, where we put Band-Aids on cancers and ignore the realities of long-terms problems."
- State Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, speaking last week in Tallahassee.
To borrow from one of Lee's legislative counterparts from Hillsborough County, House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, it's a great day in Florida.
A leading Republican is talking the bare bones truth. Lee is talking about the need for his party to face its responsibility regarding the state's finances.
The Republicans hardly could be in a more delightful spot. It's a doozy of a squeeze.
They have come to dominance by harping on the promise that they wouldn't raise taxes. Ever. But what do they do when leaders like Lee go looking into the cookie jar and come back saying there are no cookies left? How do you hang on to your principles and run the state when there's nothing left to run it with?
I may be crazy - I have been called worse - but I sense a revolution coming, slowly, but coming nonetheless.
It began 16 years ago, in 1987, and although it probably seems a terrible time to the people who survived it, someday we'll take the long view.
Sixteen years ago, a Democratic Legislature and a Republican governor, Tampa's Bob Martinez, tried to adopt a tax on personal and professional services, everything from billboards to haircuts.
The tax would have given Florida great stability in how it gets the money to provide the services we expect of government, not the up and down income we get from the sales tax on retail items that fluctuates with the economy. Stability would have made it much easier to plan one year to the next the programs that government funds.
Business lobbying, state and national, against the tax was intense. Martinez backed down. The Legislature repealed the tax.
Nothing like it has been tried since. The state's needs have grown and the budget problems have gotten worse. The party in control has switched.
Sixteen years is a long time. It takes a long time for controversial ideas - like taxes in a state where the bar against an income tax is enshrined in the state Constitution - to take hold. It won't be next year. It might be five years from now.
But this is my guess. Sometime, maybe in another 16 years, Florida will have in place some stable tax structure that solves the problem Tom Lee is talking about. Bad things will have to happen in the meantime to underscore the need. More voices, from unexpected corners like Tom Lee's, will have to be raised. There will have to be a convergence of ideas and events, so that the t-word is no longer so dirty.
And one voice will have to be louder than the rest.
"Until the governor of Florida is convinced we have a problem sufficiently large to warrant a tax increase, we aren't going to have one," Tom Lee said at week's end. "It's going to require a crisis of some kind."
This governor is not convinced. Last week, Jeb Bush was complaining about "whining," and I presume he had Lee in mind. When you're as sunny-minded as Bush and his go-boy, Johnnie Byrd, a man like Lee, the chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, is a definite inconvenience.
As is Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville. As is Sen. Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. They too have howled about the budget. Or, if you prefer, whined.
I've been reminded that when they were in charge, the Democrats fought one another like this. But the Democrats weren't elected on a promise to cut and prune, prune and cut, in every corner of government. The Democrats lacked the mandate the Republicans have - the mandate that the wisest among them are coming to see won't work.
