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Indecent proposal

Gov. Bush's budget plan would repeal the intangibles tax and end the Medically Needy program. Fortunately, the Legislature isn't likely to go along with it.

Gov. Jeb Bush is proposing a budget that would repeal the remaining taxes on Florida's wealthiest stockholders and deprive thousands of seriously ill people access to the hospitals and doctors who keep them alive. What the taxpayers would save is nearly what it would cost the state to continue the federally subsidized Medically Needy program.

Is this what the people of Florida wish the government to do in our names? Who among us could look in the mirror and say yes?

Judging by what House Speaker Allan Bense and Senate President Tom Lee had to say, it is unlikely that the Legislature will follow Bush's cynical script. The stockholders may get their tax cut, but not at the expense of those whose lives depend on the medical assistance.

It bears remembering that these are, for the large part, hard-working but chronically ill citizens who can't afford or can't get medical insurance and would be left without food or shelter by having to pay their own medical bills. The governor rationalizes that they would remain eligible for prescription assistance, but that line has a let-them-eat-cake ring to it. Who would write their prescriptions? Who would examine them to make sure the medicine is working as it should? Who would treat them if complications occur, as they so often do?

Bush's "draconian" proposal, as Bense described it, smells of a ploy to pressure the Legislature to accept a radical restructuring of Medicaid along the lines the governor outlined last week. There is no doubt that Medicaid costs need to be brought under control, but it should not be done at the peril of those whose lives literally depend on assistance, nor should they should have to sweat out the slow processes by which the Legislature decides. The governor notes, accurately, that a law he signed last year stipulated a final solution to the perennial debate by terminating the Medically Needy program, except for prescription drugs, at the conclusion of the current budget year June 30. But that decision was a political compromise between those who cared not and those who cared greatly; without it, the program would have expired already. Many were hoping that Bush would consult his conscience and restore it to the next budget. Fortunately, the governor only proposes; it is the Legislature that decides.

Something else that bears remembering is that the intangibles tax is all that this state asks of citizens in proportion to their wealth. Unlike most, we have no tax on personal income. One result is that the burden on Florida's poorest citizens, in proportion to what they earn, is five times as high as the effort expected of the rich. The only thing unfair about the intangibles tax is that some people manage to evade what they legally owe. For those who do pay, the first $500,000 in a couple's assets is exempt. So are bank accounts and qualified retirement funds regardless of amount. Thereafter, the rate is only $1 per $1,000. That is not onerous.

There is, in fact, not much left of the intangibles tax, barely $300-million a year. It could be spared, perhaps, if Florida were already properly meeting its obligations to education and public health. But we are not, and for a governor to propose to repeal the tax in the same breath in which he writes off thousands of sick people shames us all.

[Last modified January 23, 2005, 00:13:14]