Monday, August 18, 2008

Haridopolos: Still Beating the Drum for Sensible Tax Reform

Being a state senator is rarely a glamorous job. And telling an audience of 42 people at a community college why they should reject a proposed property tax cut is about the last kind of fun most of us can imagine. But, as the Tallahassee Democrat chronicles, that's exactly what state Senator Mike Haridopolos is still doing, even in the wake of Amendment 5 (the property tax-cut proposal in question) getting kicked off the November ballot. 

The message, in a nutshell: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If Amendment 5 had made it to the ballot, voters would have been able to evaluate a clearly defined tax cut and an amorphous, poorly defined sales tax increase. (The ballot language says that the sales tax hike could take the form of either a rate increase or expanding the tax base to include more services, or both.) The tax cut was concrete, the tax hike was hypothetical and could actually be avoided entirely if the revenue loss is made up through spending cuts. That's the genius of Amendment 5: there's always the possibility, in the ballot language anyway, that there really would be a free lunch: property tax cuts for nothing. 

Haridopolos, commendably, wants to remind voters that if they take the property tax cut now, the other shoe will almost certainly drop: he argues that for many voters, the net result of Amendment 5 could be a tax hike. And while he hit the campaign trail on this issue long before last week's news of a growing projected budget deficit, his stance looks much more prescient in the face of a $1.5 billion budget hole.

The adjective "brave" shouldn't have to be used to describe a simple policy discussion. So to describe the Senator's stance as brave says more about the head-in-the-sand attitude exhibited by most lawmakers (and, sadly, many voters) than it does about the Senator himself. But Senator Haridopolos is to be commended for asking the hard questions that so many others seem unwilling to confront.

1 comment:

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