St. Petersburg Times Editorial
Monday, January 25, 2010
For more than a year, Florida Senate President Jeff Atwater has quietly filled the leadership vacuum in Tallahassee. That makes it all the more disappointing that Atwater has succumbed to the easy rhetoric of an election year by pledging to not raise taxes to help solve the state's potential $3 billion deficit. That's in his self-interest as he campaigns to be the state's next chief financial officer, but it's not in Florida's.
Atwater, a Republican banker from North Palm Beach, surely knows better. By rejecting any tax increases, he has now boxed the Senate — which has long served as a ballast to the extreme antitax House — into only two options: cut state services and borrow more money. The former might burnish his fiscal conservative credentials, but the latter doesn't.
Resisting more taxes might have seemed reasonable if this was three years ago, when the state was fresh off its real estate heyday and the budget was plump. But it's not. The budget for 2010-11 is the first in four years that is expected to be bigger than the year before. But only barely, and it isn't expected to grow nearly enough, even with the help of another $2.2 billion in federal stimulus funds to cover increased costs for everything from Medicaid to prisons to schools. Nor will Atwater and his colleagues be able to dip deeply into the state's trust funds — they've already drained them nearly dry.