December 01, 2007

Florida Panel: Tax Services. Really.

The Florida Taxation and Budget Reform Commission, which meets once a generation (true) to recommend structural changes to Florida's tax system, has come up with a good one: expanding the sales tax base to include more services.

This very sensible idea has an unfortunate history of inducing groans wherever it's brought up; just ask lawmakers right now in Maryland or Michigan.

But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea: it's not. It just means that implementing a sales tax on services would require taking unwarranted tax breaks away from very specific groups who would like to keep them, thank you very much, and who tend to have lobbyists on call 24-7 ready to defend these tax breaks. And that's a tall order.

Florida lawmakers probably know this better than anyone, since they were among the first (and only) states to pass (and quickly repeal) something approaching a comprehensive sales tax on services, back in the late 1980s. But at least one member of the commission who remembers those days, Martha Barnett, thinks the bitter experience from the last go-round should be used to help push through this always-good idea now. The problem last time, she thinks, was that lawmakers rushed the process:
"We tried to do too much too fast with too little information," she said.
Lawmakers in Maryland and Michigan would probably nod their heads in agreement on that one, as well.

It's easy, of course, for an unelected body such as the Commission to propose something as politically volatile as a services tax. And if lawmakers act on the Commission's recommendation, they can count on a lot of political opposition.

But it's still the right thing to do. Check out Fair Tax Florida's policy brief on taxing services for more information.

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