"Unfair to Everyone:" Evaluating the Save our Homes Tax Break

The Florida Senate Finance Committee is deliberating this week on property tax reform options-- and opponents of the ill-starred "Save Our Homes" tax cap aren't pulling their punches.

It's "unfair to everyone," Volusia County Property Appraiser Morgan Gilreath told the committee. "It doesn't matter if you're a homeowner. You're discriminated against from when you buy your home. If you come in from another state, you're only equal to someone who comes into the state the same day you did."When you become a Florida citizen, you're not as good as the people who moved here last year, and they're not as good as the people who moved here the year before, and they're all better than the people who are coming," he added.

The big question facing lawmakers this year on "Save Our Homes" is a simple one: reform or repeal? Only too often, lawmakers address problematic taxes not through well-tailored reforms but through outright repeal: witness what the federal government has done with the estate tax (not to mention what Florida did last year with its intangible property tax). So it's a responsible first step, I suppose, to think about ways in which "Save our Homes" can be modified without outright repeal.

But in the case, the angels may not be on the "reform" side at all. What's being "reformed" here isn't a tax-- it's a tax break. A big, fat, unaffordable, poorly targeted tax break. We know from national experience that there are better-targeted ways of achieving meaningful property tax reform, most notably the "circuit breaker" credits that are now in vogue nationwide. So you can make a case that outright repeal is a pretty sensible option for dealing with the Save our Homes fiasco.