They Want to Get Rid of Your Property Taxes Because They Think You Are Morons

The Republican plan to defund everything.

Gaze upon your pagan god. (Photo: Getty)

Today, the Florida legislature is meeting in a special session to consider oafish brute governor Ron Desantis’s proposal to slash the state’s property taxes. Currently, Florida residents can exempt $50,000 of their primary home’s value from taxation. Desantis, seeking a signature policy win before his term is up at the end of this year, is trying to raise that exemption first to $250,000, and eventually to zero out property taxes altogether for 92% of homeowners.

One obvious thing to be said about this plan is: if you get rid of property taxes, you are going to cost local governments a lot of money. School districts are particularly worried. For good reason. The Florida Policy Institute took a stab at calculating the losses for every county and school district in the state. The initial $250,000 exemption would cost school districts $5 billion a year. That number would rise to $8.6 billion per year with total property tax exemption, which Desantis wants to have by the year 2030. Poorer counties, where property values are lower, would be hit harder by first tranche of the policy— “In many rural fiscally constrained counties, due to the assessed value of properties, the cost of a $250,000 homestead exemption is close to the cost of full elimination,” according to FPI.

Education officials, whose own initial estimates of revenue losses echo those of FPI, are freaking the fuck out. “It would have a significant adverse effect on the quality of education here,” the Pasco County superintendent of schools told the Tampa Bay Times. Even a $150,000 exemption, the very first step up Desantis’s proposed ladder, would amount to “about an 18% decrease in teacher salary, to give you a scope of it.”

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“‘Concerned’ is probably an understatement,” Winter Garden City Manager Jon Williams told the Orlando Sentinel. “We don’t have that kind of capacity within our budget to be able to absorb that.”

“It’s going to mess up a lot of stuff,” said Ocoee Mayor Rusty Johnson.

Of course, the same local officials seem to take it for granted that Florida voters would approve the tax cuts, as they would need to in order for them to go into effect. A poll in April found that 77% of state voters were either “definitely” or “probably” in favor of rolling back property taxes. Floridians, many of whom are the sort of people to deny climate change at the same time that a hurricane is carrying away their roof, are generally happy to make poor long term decisions in exchange for short term benefits. (As a Florida native, I reserve the right to speak accurately about the many idiots in Florida.) These people will fill every last wetland and kill every last endangered species in the state in order to build enormous highways that take them to a simulated walkable city overseen by a cartoon mouse. We should not expect too much wisdom from Florida voters, at least not as the voting base stands right this minute.

Desantis is making vague promises that all of these revenue shortfalls will be replaced by grants directly from the state to local governments, to maintain “core local services.” Even if you are foolish enough to trust that such grants would come close to replacing the revenue that will be destroyed, you will notice that this would shift power over local budgets from cities and counties (some of which are Democratic) to the state (which is, at the moment, solid red). It is a state version of the ideological veto that the Trump administration has wielded ruthlessly against blue states, cities, and institutions of all sorts. If a Florida locality passed a law that displeased erudite humanitarian Ron Desantis, he could threaten funding for their libraries and street sweepers and everything else in order to scare them out of it. Thus, the plan would not only scratch the Republican itch for regressive tax cuts, but also for centralizing power in their own gerrymandered hands. It would prompt local governments to immediately try to fill the hole by imposing steep fees on every last transaction and license and raising taxes on every last property not covered by the homestead exemption. It would leave citizens more beleaguered, with worse services and schools, and more subject to the political control of “Moron kid of the owner of several regional Ford dealerships, who wants to hurry up and sign whatever the governor wants so they can get back to sexually harassing high school waitresses at the golf course clubhouse,” which is a fair description of the median Republican Florida statehouse member.

A metaphor.

Axing property taxes is just the latest manifestation of the grand right wing project—which has defined the South for generations—of making states into little dystopias of poor public services and poor public education in order to give wealthy residents low taxes and a large pool of desperate, low-wage labor to fulfill all of their needs. For red states like Florida that have already done away with state income taxes, property taxes are the final barrier standing in the way of fully realizing this ill-advised model of government. Republicans imagine that pushing taxes on wealthy residents as close to zero as possible will attract an influx of rich people to their states, and that those rich people can send their kids to private schools and start profitable businesses with all the low-wage labor, and this will lead to a state with great golf courses and rich private developments behind security gates and awful public schools and well-funded militaristic police forces to keep the poors at bay. What the South already is, in other words— just more so.

“This is really a historic opportunity to have more money in people’s pockets and to actually have their home be their private property that the government just can’t use as a piggy bank,” says Ron Desantis, who assumes that voters are gullible rubes with the understanding of a child. Paying property taxes means that “you never actually own anything. you just rent it from the government forever,” say a zillion gullible rubes online, proving him right. Southern Republicans have had great success by wagering that their voters have the attention spans of goldfish and economic reasoning skills of hyperactive kittens: They will vote for all tax cuts, complain about how the government doesn’t do things well, and then blame immigrants and/ or their black neighbors. It’s been working for a long time!

If there is any tangible lesson to be extracted from this latest step down the path towards a government that exists solely to defund everything except the police who will tackle you when you protest the government, it is that the political opposition must be able to articulate a positive vision of what government can and should be—along with a negative vision of the bootlicker goons whose entire political platform is to fuck up your schools and cut your wages and funnel your state’s wealth into the pockets of New York investment funds. Have some fucking self-respect, Florida homeowners! You are being treated as weak pawns who will give up all the promises of civilized society in order to save a few bucks on your tax bill. You will get a tax cut and in exchange you will give up any possibility of having a state where everyone has equal access to a decent education and functioning public services and the plausible possibility of making a better life for themselves than their parents had. That ain’t gonna happen when you defund local governments and put total economic power in the hands of people who consider Fox News their favorite philosopher. I’m sorry for sounding like some kinda MSNBC boomer here, but come the fuck on. Republicans want you dumb and desperate and willing to serve them drinks on a golf course for less than $15 an hour. That’s it! Enjoy your tax cut, suckers! Huddle in your home and pray there are no storms this year. They ain’t coming to rescue you. They cut the funding for that. Maybe that money you saved on property taxes can buy you a bus ticket to a blue state.

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Also

• Related reading: The Cannibal South; Fascist Economics Don’t Work; The Confederacy Won’t Die Until Florida Does.

• Florida politics are particularly interesting because… demographically, it’s barely even a red state! There is no reason the Democrats in Florida should be so pathetically weak, except for their own pathetic nature. Florida is a state powered by a tourism-centered service economy. That means that organized labor can be powerful there. If you want to make Florida’s politics better, join a union. Here is a book that can tell you more about how.

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