Here's an editorial from someone who is not on "Charlie's List."
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DAN GELBER
Democratic Leader of the Florida House
On Jan. 29 Floridians will get a chance to vote on the tax amendment crafted by the Florida Legislature. I'm voting No because the choice the Legislature gave Floridians makes no sense to me.
• It requires voters to choose to fund a too-small tax break with scarce public education dollars.
• It greatly exacerbates an already unequal tax system.
• It delivers modest relief at the expense of reform, when we should be striving to deliver real tax relief through true reform.
How is it that a state considered by every index to be a low tax state finds itself in the midst of a bona fide tax crisis? The answer, simply put, is that Florida has created gross inequities in its tax burden. Over the last decade, the Legislature handed out close to $20 billion in special-interest tax exemptions and corporate giveaways. While it was giving away your money, the same Legislature was increasing your school property tax and shifting more of the burden of government to your counties and cities and, ultimately, onto local property owners.
But rather than directly address this dynamic, the Legislature crafted a measure that will only exacerbate the current inequities in our tax code.
Under the new plan, homeowners with homestead exemptions who already receive protected status through the Save Our Homes 3 percent tax cap will be able to take their SOH savings with them if they move -- a concept known as ''portability.'' This means that almost all the relief will go to homeowners who purchased their homes many years ago, while homeowners who purchased or moved in the last few years (or in future years) when home prices were highest will forever be paying a much greater share of the tax burden. I have always supported portability -- but only if it is part of a reform that addresses the inequities in the tax burden, by providing relief to new and future homeowners as well.
Additionally, by creating a tax system that guarantees similarly situated neighbors will always pay grossly different amounts of taxes, the Legislature has opened up Florida's tax plan, including the original SOH amendment, to constitutional challenge. Ironically, last year the Legislature hired a renowned tax expert to advise us on what kind of portability Florida could implement without offending constitutional notions of fairness. While he gave us lots of advice in his 93-page report, his primary advice was to stay away from exactly the kind of portability we placed on the January ballot.
While the proposed amendment addresses homeowners, it totally ignores everyone else. Businesses and snowbirds who already pay more since the SOH tax cap doesn't apply to them, will see increases. And renters will get the worst deal -- they will continue to pay property taxes indirectly without the benefit of any tax cap and end up not even owning the asset they are paying taxes on. Ouch!
Unfairness is not the only problem with the Jan. 29 plan. While the Legislature could have drafted an amendment that held public education harmless, it chose instead to fund tax relief with lots of public education dollars. The Legislature's own Economic & Demographic Research Center calculated that if Floridians adopt the Jan. 29 amendment, Florida's public education system will lose billions of dollars over the next five years. Why should we take that much out of a system that already ranks last in per-capita education spending and that has had the worst high school graduation rate in the nation for three consecutive years?
Perhaps the best reason why you should vote No on Jan. 29 is that this is one of those occasions where you should hold out for a better plan. If the amendment passes, most assuredly we will never get tax relief and reform. We will have created too many winners and losers such that there will never be another opportunity to achieve the necessary 60 percent approval of voters to amend the Florida Constitution.
I hope that the state's Taxation & Budget Reform Commission, a citizen group that has the authority to put measures on the ballot for approval, will have the courage to review the billions in tax breaks that the Legislature gave special interests and rebalance our tax code so that property owners get a real break.
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