A Novel Concept – Let’s Pay for What We Do!

Maybe I am becoming too old-fashioned. I simply cannot relate to the “innovative financing” that our state and federal governments want to use.
When my parents sent me to college with my first checking account - this was before credit cards - they gave me one simple lesson: You could not write a check for an amount greater than your checking account balance! That seemed easy enough. From that day forward, I operated under the premise that if my bills appeared to exceed my earnings I had two options – spend less or earn more.
Government seems to rely on the backwards theory that an entity can spend more as its earnings, or revenues, fall. At the federal level we simply print more money. That’s a nice option if you can get away with it, but we would all be charged with counterfeiting. The Florida Legislature’s method of choice is to take from one pot and place in another. Unfortunately, at some point all the pots will come up empty.
Please understand, I am no wild-eyed tax and spend liberal. I do believe it is time we face the fact in Florida that we need more revenues. Our Florida tax system is broken. We have several options to look at and we should not rule any option out. Education and Medicaid eat huge portions of our general revenue. We cannot continue to rob our trust funds to balance our general revenue needs.
Not only is it foolish and short-sighted, I believe it is illegal. We are stealing from trust funds and spending the money in areas it was never intended for. With the federal stimulus (remember, they can print money) running out this year, we will be in a much bigger budget hole next year. At that point, even our trust funds won’t be able to fill the gap. Our leaders must step up and face our budget reality.
User fees are just that – user fees. You pay for it only when you use it. Florida’s gas tax, which helps generate revenues for our State Transportation Trust Fund, was intended for just that purpose. If you use Florida’s roads, you help make sure they are functional by contributing to the Transportation Trust Fund via user fees like the gas tax. With the proposed raids on the Trust Fund however, user fees ultimately become a tax as these revenues are no longer funding what they were intended to be collected for. We can fund transportation with fair and reasonable user fees. It’s time we did that before it is too late.