Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Jan. 28
The Orlando Sentinel on tax cut plan and higher education spending:
State leaders who will determine Florida’s next budget were operating under wildly different assumptions this week. Like Washington, D.C., Tallahassee has entered the era of alternative facts.
Last Wednesday, Gov. Rick Scott unveiled his latest tax cut proposal, a package worth $618 million. The Republican governor insisted there would be “plenty of revenues” left over after necessary state spending to cover the cost of his tax cuts.
Meanwhile, members of the House subcommittee in charge of higher-education spending were telling state university leaders to prepare to slash as much as 10 percent from their budgets. GOP House leaders have been sounding the alarm on a possible shortfall of $1 billion or more next year.
Splitting the difference between this feast or famine outlook are the state’s economists, who have projected a $7.5 million surplus next year, followed by a mushrooming deficit of $1.3 billion in the following year and $1.9 billion the year after that. We’re more inclined to trust the economists, who aren’t politicians eyeing their next election and spinning the numbers to justify their policy priorities.
For Scott, that priority seems to be cutting taxes. For the latest crop of House leaders, shrinking government appears to be Job 1.
There’s a political subtext behind these competing visions.
Scott is term limited as governor, but continues to rake in millions of dollars in political contributions. He is widely expected to challenge Florida’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Bill Nelson, in 2018. Scott’s tax cut proposals are bound to be sound bites for him on the campaign trail.
House Speaker Richard Corcoran is a possible Republican candidate to succeed Scott. If he runs, it’ll be on the strength of his record over the next two years as speaker.
The biggest part of Scott’s tax package is a cut of $454 million in the state sales levy on commercial leases. The governor maintains Florida’s tax is bad for business, because other states don’t tax commercial leases. Normally we’d be sympathetic to that argument.
But it’s worth noting that the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, annually ranks Florida among the most tax-friendly states for business - even with the commercial lease tax. And the projections from the state’s economists indicate Florida can’t spare that much revenue next year, no matter what the governor says.
The other parts of Scott’s package would be easier to afford, and are more worthy of consideration from legislators: $98 million worth of sales-tax holidays, including $78 million for back-to-school supplies; $51 million in sales-tax breaks on college texts and other books; and a hike in the small-business exemption for corporate income tax, costing the state $15 million.
This week’s House subcommittee hearing on higher education spending was an eye-opening reminder of the consequences of double-digit budget cuts. Slicing 10 percent out of university budgets would cost the system $274 million. Chancellor Marshall Criser warned that a cut that size could undermine the progress universities have made in raising their quality and meeting the Legislature’s performance standards.
University of Central Florida Provost Dale Whittaker said a 10 percent cut would cost UCF $26 million. To make up that money, UCF would have to eliminate non-faculty jobs, delay lab renovations, reduce its regional campuses and freeze a plan to hire more faculty to attract research dollars and lower the student to faculty ratio. With UCF planning to open a new downtown Orlando campus in another couple of years, the timing couldn’t be worse.
As if the budget waters weren’t murky enough, Senate President Joe Negron, another Republican leader, has proposed $1 billion in additional state funding for higher education over the next two years. Negron has called Florida’s universities and colleges “our primary economic engine to drive vibrant, sustainable economic development and growth in high-paying jobs.” We agree.
Negron’s funding goal might be more aspirational than practical, but it’s worth pursuing. Legislators won’t get close if they cut too deeply into state revenues.
Online:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com
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Jan. 26
The Florida Times-Union on Florida Chamber of Commerce and insurance reform:
This is an era when sensibly moderate agendas are increasingly hard to find.
But “sensible and moderate” usually describes the type of agenda rolled out each year by the Florida Chamber of Commerce.
And it aptly characterizes the list of priorities that the chamber plans to pursue during the Florida Legislature’s upcoming session.
“Our main focus is to keep Florida competitive in every way,” said David Hart, the chamber’s executive vice president, during a recent session with the Times-Union editorial board.
That theme is obvious in the chamber’s current legislative agenda, which offers common-sense proposals that deserve serious consideration by Florida lawmakers.
The chamber’s overriding top priority, Hart said, is to urge legislators to make reforms in the state workers compensation system.
Hart declared that it has become so rife with abuse and manipulation that the average Florida employer is facing a whopping 14.5 percent increase in its worker-related insurance rates.
“We’re seeing the highest (rate increases) in the Southeast,” Hart said, noting that it could lead countless Florida businesses to raise prices, decrease employee benefits, freeze hiring or even lay off staff.
And while the rising insurance costs are hurting Florida businesses and taxpayers, Hart suggested, “law firms across the state are (opening up) workers compensation offices because they see a pot of money” they can earn by exploiting the current crisis.
Granted, Hart is likely indulging in a bit of hyperbole with that jab at the legal industry.
But there’s a reason why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has determined that only six states have worse legal climates for business than Florida - and one factor is surely the dramatic rate hikes that state businesses are absorbing to protect themselves against workers compensation claims.
It’s an issue that lawmakers should address in a constructive manner when they convene in March.
Hart also told the editorial board that the chamber will seek Legislature support to reduce property insurance fraud, a problem he said has reached epidemic proportions and threatens a wide swath of businesses across Florida.
“It’s driving up costs for everyone,” Hart said.
Hart said that while the overwhelming majority of construction and home-repairs firms in Florida are reputable, there is a small but significant segment that has perfected the art of trolling neighborhoods (particularly after bad weather), convincing homeowners that their properties need work - and then offering to do the jobs at cheap rates if the residents agree to sign away the “assignment of benefits” rights in their property insurance policies.
Once they have those rights, Hart said, the unscrupulous firms send grossly inflated claims to insurance companies - and then rely on equally dubious lawyers to file time-consuming legal actions if the insurers balk at paying the excessive charges.
Too often, Hart said, insurers find it easier to simply pay the money and make the con artists go away.
“We need to tighten up legal (loopholes) that are causing this dramatic increase in fraudulent, false cases,” Hart said.
Here again, the chamber is pursuing a rational remedy for a problem that has grown to an irrational level.
And here, too, it’s an issue that deserves to be properly addressed by the Legislature during the upcoming session.
Too often, this state has been a hotbed of fraudsters on many fronts.
It requires continual vigilance to stop them.
common-sense values
On these and other issues - including its reasonable call for Florida officials to not overreact to the recent “Let’s pay Pitbull to promote our state” controversy by cutting funds for tourism campaigns - the Florida Chamber of Commerce should be applauded.
It is taking the right approach by focusing on three words that our state should always embrace:
. Sensible.
. Moderate.
. Competitive.
Online:
https://jacksonville.com
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Jan. 31
The Palm Beach Post on the state’s ports doing business with Cuba:
Port of Palm Beach officials see an opportunity in normalizing relations with the communist island of Cuba. As well they should.
The port is in an advantageous position geographically. It has a deep and rich history of trade with the island, pre-Fidel Castro. And most important, the 156-acre port has room to expand and accommodate any future growth in a relationship.
This is no pie-in-the-sky proposal. This is a well-thought-out growth plan led by Port Executive Director Manuel Almira, who was born in Cuba. For example, ground was broken in July 2016 on a $10.4 million mini-slip at the port’s southernmost berth that could eventually serve as a base for cargo service to Cuba - and boost local businesses.
This economic potential deserves the state’s support, not to be held hostage to politics of the moment. But Gov. Rick Scott, who has made job growth the focal point of his two terms in office, has unfortunately lost focus when it comes to the state’s ports doing business with Cuba.
Days before a delegation of Cuban maritime leaders was to arrive for separate meetings with officials of three Florida ports - Palm Beach, Port Everglades and Port Tampa Bay - Scott issued a threat, via Twitter no less, to cut funding for port operators that do business with Cuba.
That threat risks $920,000 this year for the Port of Palm Beach.
“Disappointed some FL ports would enter into any agreement with Cuban dictatorship,” Scott wrote in a series of tweets on Jan. 25. “I will recommend restricting state funds for ports that work with Cuba in my budget. We cannot condone Raul Castro’s oppressive behavior. Serious security/human rights concerns.”
Though laudable, the governor’s reasoning smacks of hypocrisy. The Cuban government indeed remains an oppressive regime under President Raul Castro, despite the movement toward normalization of relations begun by President Barack Obama two years ago. But more than a half century of Cold War relations, centered on a draconian trade embargo, hasn’t done much to bring democracy to the island’s 11 million residents either.
Moreover, Cuba is not the only oppressive communist regime the United States - and Florida - would do business with.
China, the United States’ largest trading partner, is well known for its iron hand and shows little sign of changing. “The outlook for fundamental human rights, including freedoms of expression, assembly, association and religion, remains dire,” says the nongovernmental Human Rights Watch in its latest world report.
The government controls the media, restricts the internet, arrests dissidents, regulates religious practice. There is only one political party. Human rights lawyers and activists are detained, their forced “confessions” shown on nationwide TV, and punished with stiff prison sentences.
Yet the People’s Republic of China is a land of McDonald’s, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut and Wal-Mart. General Motors and other major American giants do big business there. It’s where iPhones and iPads are manufactured, where the all-American Barbies and G.I. Joes are made.
Was Scott thinking of any of these contradictions when, on human rights grounds, he slammed the ports’ plans to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Port Administration of Cuba to cover future cooperation?
“There’s no human rights down there. I don’t believe our ports should be doing business with a brutal dictator,” Scott said last week. “We should say to ourselves, ’We are going to do business where they are not doing what Raul Castro is doing.’ “
Did Scott somehow forget that he has personally courted China during trade missions for the state of Florida?
As Almira told The Post’s Susan Salisbury: “Private businesses based at ports do business with Cuba, not the ports themselves. The port’s role is to help with that.”
The state’s role is to help expand Florida trade and grow Florida jobs. Not pick winners and losers based on politics.
Though laudable, the governor’s reasoning smacks of hypocrisy.
Online:
https://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/
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