Orlando Sentinel

Is The Wall Street Journal right? Is Florida ‘well-managed’? It depends.

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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, a/k/a the voice of the One Percent, assailed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week for seeking more federal aid to cope with the coronaviru­s.

“Should Florida Bail Out New York?” posed the headline of the editorial. It lauded Florida as an example of “well-managed” states whose people, it said, should not have to support New York’s “tax and spend governance.”

That’s a Republican Party talking point, expressed locally by Florida’s ex-governor and now U.S. senator, Rick Scott.

If the sole criterion for good management is low taxes, as the Journal’s seems to be, then Florida qualifies. But not if the standard is defined as serving and protecting the public.

The multitudes of laid-off workers who couldn’t get through to Florida’s CONNECT unemployme­nt compensati­on system would hardly rate Florida as favorably as the Journal does. Neither would the motorists driven to despair by the SunPass toll collection debacle. Scott birthed both of those disasters, along with budget cuts that savaged the Department of Health, leaving it woefully understaff­ed to respond to the current crisis.

The Journal’s own news department recently described CONNECT as “problem riddled” and as “the face of national frustratio­n and angst” among idled workers.

Florida’s website “is notorious and is designed to say no instead of yes at every turn,” Michelle Evermore, a researcher at the National Employment Law Project, told the newspaper.

The editorial’s beef with New York is that its taxes are high. Indeed they are. New York ranked first in the nation at nearly 13 percent of personal income. Florida, with no personal income tax, ranks 47th out of 50, at 6.56 percent.

However, there is a startling disparity behind those numbers. The One Percent in Florida pay state and local taxes at an effective rate of less than three cents on the dollar. Among the poorest, the burden is 12.7 percent, with those in the middle paying eight percent. On this measure of unfairness, Florida ranks a scandalous third worst, behind only two other states that don’t tax personal income, Washington and Texas.

New York’s tax burdens are relatively even. The effective rate for New York’s poorest is 11.4 percent, compared to 11.3 for the top one percent and 12.4 for the middle. The comparison­s are by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which last updated them in 2018.

So it’s obvious why the Journal resents New York and adores Florida, where the very richest pay nearly five times less, and why some of them, including President Trump, flee to Florida’s tax haven.

It comes down to opposite philosophi­es of what America’s spiritual forebears called the social contract. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed that, “With taxes, I buy civilizati­on.” On the other hand, the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

The Journal begrudges New York for expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while Florida didn’t. It suggests New York’s decision was a vice and Florida’s a virtue. The results cry shame.

In 2018, some 2.8 million Floridians had no health insurance, equal to 13 percent, compared to only 5.4 percent in New York. That’s scandalous, and the situation is surely worse during the pandemic.

In Florida, six of every 1,000 newborns die before their first birthday. That’s almost half again as high as in New York, where the death rate is 4.3.

The Empire State’s average life expectancy at birth is 80.5 years; in Florida, it’s nearly a year shorter at 79.6.

Both states have high sales taxes. The major difference is that Florida depends on them, while New York, with a personal income tax, has a balanced system.

Depending so much as it does on tourism, Florida’s economy is built on lowwage service jobs, which offer no health benefits.

Of the nation’s top 50 metropolit­an areas, four in Florida — Tampa, Jacksonvil­le, Miami and Orlando — rank among the bottom eight in median income, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics rankings, with Miami at $17.20 an hour and Orlando at the bottom at $15.94. Median income means that half the workers earn even less, dragged down by Florida’s paltry minimum wage of only $8.56.

Judging states as Justice Holmes might have, USA Today’s annual survey ranked New York as the 13th best place to live, Florida 25th.

“Floridians are less likely to have a college education and more likely to face serious financial hardship than the average American,” the newspaper said.

Even by Wall Street standards, New York appears to be better managed than Florida in at least one respect. According to Bloomberg.com, New York’s current interest on state debt averages 1.75 percent, compared to Florida’s 1.86 percent. Barely five years ago, Florida fared better, but since then, New York’s overall rate decrease bypassed Florida’s.

The Journal complains that New Yorkers pay a lot more on average in federal taxes than they get back from the federal government — $1,315 per capita per year, according to the Rockefelle­r Institute of Government. But that would seem to make Cuomo’s case for federal aid during the present crisis.

Given that Florida gets back more than $1,100 per capita than it sends to Washington each year, we can’t lay a strong claim to the Journal’s sympathy.

We’d be getting back even more if Florida’s political leaders would set aside their contempt for former President Obama long enough to accept the Medicaid expansion money that was a key feature of his Affordable Care Act. Nearly a third of the 36 states that have expanded Medicaid are all or largely led by Republican­s.

In Florida, before the coronaviru­s, some 450,000 of our people had nowhere to turn, earning too little to qualify for Obamacare insurance subsidies, but too much for convention­al Medicaid.

They certainly would not agree that Florida is “well managed.” The federal supplement Tallahasse­e continues to turn down — 90 percent of what it would cost to cover them — is, in effect, money our state gives back to the Treasury.

In that sense only, we are already helping out New York and the other expansion states. And it’s Florida’s own fault.

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