Legislative leaders are seeking to slash the sales tax, which is the main source of the state budget.
They want to cut a whopping $5 billion from the state’s revenue. Exactly how they would accomplish this task has not been revealed but an estimated $2 billion surplus next year will make it easier.
Tax relief of this size is a dramatic departure from 2002, when some legislators sought to impose the largest tax increase in the state’s history.
I wrote an editorial that, according to the liberal media, wrecked the plan. It was my proudest moment as an editorial editor.
My first wind of it was when RINO Senate President John McKay visited me and tried to convince me it was a good idea. I wasn’t buying it.
The gimmick was to propose a constitutional amendment to roll back back the rate from 6 cents to 4 cents but broaden the base, taxing items never taxed before That would have made the total revenue grow far more rapidly.
To sweeten the pot, McKay promised $1 billion for Big Education.
McKay’s chief henchman was a Republican senator from Jacksonville named Jim King. He had been on the Jacksonville City Council before going to Tallahassee and I knew him well. He was energetic, knowledgeable and forceful.
I wrote an editorial with the headline “The Engineer” about how King was at the throttle of a tax train running through the legislature and only he could stop a train wreck.
The editorial concluded by saying: “King should help prevent a conservative Senate from voting for an unneeded tax increase, suggesting a GOP split that would feed liberal ambitions and could wreak havoc at the polls this fall.
“There is his own future to consider. How could he lead a Senate in which the majority of his own party had been on the opposite side in the most important vote of the 2002 session?
“King should employ all of his leadership skills to ensure a defeat in the Senate for a massive tax increase, remembering the words Shakespeare gave to Henry V at Agincourt: “… ’tis true that we are in great danger; The greater therefore should our courage be.”
At the next meeting of McKay and his allies, according to a dramatic report by the ultra-liberal Tampa Bay Times, there was a recount of the votes supporting the plan. When it came his turn, King threw a copy of my editorial on the table and said, “No, I just can’t do this.”
The Times story said: “It was as if the oxygen was sucked right out of the room,” said Pruitt, who was sitting next to King. “It was one of the most intense meetings I’ve ever been involved in.”
Without King’s support and with the determined opposition of Gov. Jeb Bush, the tax plan fizzled, provoking the ire of the liberal media. We congratulated King on his courage, while the liberal media lambasted him. Although he later became Senate president, unfortunately he died a few years afterward.
There was no chance of winning a Pulitzer Prize for an editorial opposing taxes, but the satisfaction I got from the result was far better.
It also is satisfying to see the legislature, 23 years later, moving in the opposite direction, towards tax relief instead of heaping more misery on struggling Florida families.
