Finally, it’s official.
There will, indeed, be a special legislative session next month. Even Gov. Charlie Crist, not a proponent previously, is now on board. That (2008-09) $2.3 billion state budget hole – that could deepen to $3.8 billion or more in 2009-10 – plus possible harm to Florida’s credit rating and Medicaid scenarios from hell has everyone finally fixated on a resolution. Presumably, everything is on the table – especially in a state that hasn’t fundamentally changed its revenue-raising ways from the LeRoy Collins Administration years.
But you would presume wrong.
According to House Speak Ray Sansom and Senate President Jeff Atwater, the legislators will be focusing on a “combination of spending reductions and trust fund transfers.” This is crisis management? This is a crisis made worse.
In the Republican-dominated Legislature, there’s negligible support for a review – let alone an overhaul – of Florida’s tax system. There’s no-tax ideology and then there’s no-responsibility idiotology. Now is not the time to tap reserves, such as the Lawton Chiles Endowment Fund, or employ accounting sleight of hand.
For openers, it would be expedient for the Legislature to stop pouting about being a “rubber stamp” and finally approve the gambling compact with the Seminole Tribe of Florida and then get on with adding that $1 to the paltry (33.9-cent) state tax on cigarettes. Voluntary taxes should always be on the table, especially during a serious economic downturn. Especially those that would (combined) net the state more than $1 billion annually.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink seems the only one with clout willing to say what needs to be said – now more than ever. She said it was time to re-evaluate — drum roll, please — Florida’s tax system. In short, “Every sales tax exemption ought to be back on the table,” proclaimed Sink.
In other words, when rapidly ratcheting population growth largely insulated this state from recession, the old paradigm of a sales-tax skewed revenue system sufficed for the short term. The only term, of course, that mattered politically. But now that growth has flatlined, that system is insufficient. Woefully so.
Perhaps Sink could borrow Crist’s unused bully pulpit to better make the case for forward-looking options. These would include the aforementioned general sales tax (6 percent) exemptions, including certain services, as well as becoming part of the concerted regional effort to collect sales taxes on catalog and Internet sales.
And if the effort makes Sink look, well, gubernatorial, good for her. Perhaps Crist will take note – as well as notes.
Florida can no longer afford populist piffle for leadership and ad hoc band aids for an economic strategy when confronted by a crisis of unprecedented proportion.