St. Pete TimesGov. Jeb Bush has acknowledged that Florida's education system desperately needs "stable funding," but has offered no ideas for a source.
A Times Editorial
Published October 13, 2003
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Nearly five years into his tenure as education governor, Jeb Bush has responded to the financial desperation of community colleges with an assessment that is at once obvious and baffling. "We need to come up with a stable funding source," Bush said recently after a private meeting with community college presidents. "What we are doing now does not match the ebb and flow of growth."
Bush is right, of course, and virtually every serious analysis of Florida's regressive and narrowly based tax system in the past two decades has reached that same conclusion. The state's tax structure is volatile and inadequate, and, because it relies almost entirely on a sales tax that exempts large portions of the growing service economy, it spreads that thin burden in the cruelest of ways. Last year, Florida taxed people with annual incomes of $9,200 at five times the rate of those who earn almost $1-million.
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So what is the governor's plan?