Property Tax Reform: A Zero-Sum Game?

The Palm Beach Post's S.V. Date captures quite well the basic political dilemma facing Florida lawmakers as they seek to fix the state's property tax inequities. Here's the lead:

If a property tax system unfairly put hundreds or even thousands of dollars in your pocket each year, would you vote to change it?

Indeed. Unfair or not, plenty of Florida homeowners are doing just fine, thank you, under the current "Save Our Homes" tax break. But Save Our Homes does nothing for businesses, renters, snowbirds, and first-time homeowners. If these groups are to get property tax relief, the revenue loss has to get made up in some way, and none of the options sound especially palatable to lawmakers: the options are either to
(1) hike property taxes on everyone else (meaning homeowners currently protected by Save Our Homes), or
(2) come up with a new state revenue source to pay for property tax cuts (which means some kind of state tax hike).

Approach #2 is politically off-limits, it seems, because the only state tax anyone is talking about increasing is the one that's already among the highest in the nation: the sales tax. Meanwhile, the more sensible option (enacting an income tax) is politically taboo.

Which leaves approach #1, which Date characterizes as a "zero-sum game."

And, as Date points out, if you put anything before the voters that takes away the "Save our Homes" break, the numbers say it's gonna lose

:[H]omesteaders, as politicians know, are more likely to turn out to vote than non-homesteaders. How much more likely?
Webster, R-Winter Garden, estimated that two-thirds of all voters who actually vote at the polls are homesteaders.
Operatives for the Democratic and Republican parties said voter turnout ranges by geographic area from 60 percent to 90 percent.
University of South Florida political scientist Susan MacManus said that for special elections - as in the sort of election Crist and lawmakers would prefer later this year - the statewide figure could approach 80 percent. That's why Webster and others agree that it may be difficult to pass a proposal that does not somehow further help homesteaders, even though they are the one group that already enjoys a huge financial benefit.

All of which means that lawmakers need to come up with a way to relieve property taxes on the businesses and renters who are being hit hardest currently, but in a way that leaves most people better off. Not to be a broken record, but can you say "income tax?"