Seemingly everybody but Charlie Crist agrees that the challenges of a stimulus-skewed, Potemkin budget are onerous this Legislative session. Maybe $3 billion worth.
Would that this were finally the year that revenue-raising — the formula dates to the Leroy Collins’ era and is based on the Ponzi-schemed, go-go growth years — was finally addressed. And, no, cuts in health and human services, a token reduction in the state corporate income tax, and reliance on trust-fund raids, fee hikes and casino spoils don’t count.
What does count – closing unjustified sales-tax exemptions, including services, and getting serious about being part of the national push to collect Internet sales taxes — won’t happen. Again.
Crist’s watch has been defined by a tectonic shift in economic reality. A strong, gutsy leader was not merely preferable, but mandatory. Florida didn’t come close. Too politically risky for a career opportunist. The state still hasn’t adjusted. The fiscally fragile future will soon be Bill McCollum’s or Alex Sink’s — and everybody else’s — worry.
That dereliction of meaningful, pragmatically targeted leadership should be the Crist legacy – not that his ideology-free politics got him Tea-bagged by Marco Rubio.