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Spa treatment for your poodle? Pay tax

By DIANE ROBERTS
Published January 31, 2007

As Scarlett O'Hara, belle and libertarian capitalist, put it, "Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never a convenient time for any of them."

Hard to argue: Life, wealth and a 17-inch waist are preferable by far. But a girl has to admit there are times when taxes, while not convenient, are necessary. A positive social good, even. In 1987, Florida Gov. Bob Martinez embraced a sales tax on services: real estate agents, accountants' fees, advertising, dry cleaning, etc. The Legislature passed it, and for one brief shining moment Florida, burdened with an Old South hangover of a revenue structure, was fixing to lead the way for the New South.

Then the real estate agents and accountants and dry cleaners and advertisers - especially advertisers - began to buy air time, shrieking like cornered possums. Voters reared up: They're going to tax an oil change for the Buick and Mama's Sunday dress dry cleaning? Martinez's poll numbers crashed; he recanted. So did the Legislature. The services tax was repealed after just six months.

Pity. With some fine-tuning so as not to hit small businesses or lower-income people too hard, the services sales tax might have given Florida a higher education system on par with Michigan or New York. We could have built schools instead of prisons and boasted a per-pupil spending rate in the nation's top 10 - instead of the bottom 10. Maybe we would have been able to treat the mentally ill instead of chucking them in jail. Maybe we would have saved Lake Okeechobee or bought up more precious wild land before it got condo-fied. Florida wouldn't have been paradise, but it could have been far better.

Twenty years on, there's a new governor in Tallahassee. Charlie Crist comes trailing bright clouds of populism and bipartisanship, promising a shiny new Florida with, among other things, education that is "the best in the nation." That's going to cost some serious money. He also wants to double the homestead exemption, leaving counties to figure out how they are going to make up the shortfall and pay for schools, police, firefighters, libraries and so on. State revenues are not keeping up with the impact our runaway growth has on classrooms, social programs and the environment. Florida's real estate market is deflating like a cheap balloon, too. It doesn't help that Crist's predecessor handed tax cuts to corporations and the richest Floridians.

To produce the money to keep 21st century Florida from slipping into Banana Republicanism, the state might get creative: turn the old Capitol into posh condos (think how that would warm Jeb Bush's heart); sell Key West to Bill Gates; hold a bake sale (just like the state's public schools do); or raise sales tax to, say, 20 percent.

Or, why not slap a 1 or 2 percent tax on services that cannot, unless you are Donald Trump, be called necessities? You need a place to live; you need food and medicine; you may need a veterinarian, a doctor or a lawyer. Let's not tax those. But you do not need pet grooming, a golf club membership, or a skybox. Hiring a financial planner or a masseuse or a personal trainer or a feng shui specialist or an interior decorator or a taxidermist or a psychic would be one of life's extras, not entitlements. Tax that stuff.

Scarlett would not like it (she hated parting with money worse than she hated parting with Rhett); nobody likes taxes. But if you want to have a decent civil society, you have to have taxes. Charlie Crist may be Florida's best hope for the kind of courage it takes to even utter the word "tax" at the Capitol. He could exhort the citizens to make the sacrifice: pay the extra four bits at the golf course; cough up a nickel on that green tea foaming facial. Given Crist's considerable political skills, he could inspire the citizens to see a services tax as a social virtue. Tell them what the distinguished geneticist Steve Jones said: "Sex and taxes are in many ways the same. Tax does to cash what males do to genes. It dispenses assets among the population as whole."

When you put it like that, taxes sound positively fun.

Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, teaches English and writing at Florida State University.

[Last modified January 31, 2007, 00:52:51]