After the debate debacle last night, I’m counting on Ben Braver to help save us from what may be coming. He’s a 21 year old progressive running for the Florida state Senate in a Republican-held red-to-purple seat north of Tampa. He’s the Director of State and Local Policy for the Young Democrats of America. He’s also a Gen-Z Public Middle School Teacher in Hillsborough County who graduated from USF with a degree in Economics.
When I interviewed him as part of the Blue America candidate vetting process, I was super-impressed— as I hope you are about to be when you read his guest post below. If you are, please consider contributing to his campaign here or here. I just did.
And, by the way, Ben led a mass walkout of over 5,000 students and educators across every public university in Florida calling attention to Ron DeSantis’ inhumane education policies, a protest that was covered not just in the local press but by CNN, MSNBC and Teen Vogue. If the Democratic Party fielded more candidates, up and down the ballot, like Ben Braver, the country's democracy would be a lot healthier.
Florida’s Reverse Robin Hood Tax Code
-by Ben Braver
Candidate For Florida state Senate, District 23
Florida entices people to move here with three key points: 1) beaches, 2) Disney, 3) no income tax. Families are told that all the money they’ll be saving from income taxes will buy them the leisure they dream of-- lounging by the sea, riding roller coasters, enjoying the sun. And this is true-- for those who arrive as millionaires. For the millions of Floridians who actually work jobs, this tax code makes affording time off to enjoy the beaches, or tickets to Disney, harder than ever to achieve. That’s because we have a regressive tax structure where the hardest working, poorest people in Florida pay the most in taxes while the richest pay the least. In fact, the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy showed that Florida has the single most regressive tax system in the country.
It’s called regressive because even though the rate is held constant, the actual effect it has on people lessens or “regresses” the higher one’s income rises. This kind of code places the highest burden on those least able to pay it, those most desperate to just survive, and gives all of the actual “tax relief” to the people who need it the least. This tax structure works primarily as a method to transfer money from people who work for a living to people whose job consists of just owning things, from the bottom to the top.
The bottom 20% of our state, those making less than $20,000 a year, have to spend well over one tenth of their income on taxes while people making over $735,700 spend less than 3%. After taxes the poor person has only $17,400 of purchasing power a year, the rich person will still have $716,000. But what’s really important aren’t the numbers, as absurdly unbalanced as they are, but the men, women, and children behind them. To a person making only $20,000 a year, 13% is not just a bad statistic; it is the difference between having a bed to sleep in or going unhoused. It’s the difference between eating or seeing their children go hungry. It’s the terrible choice between buying medicine or paying the water bill. The rich person who pays less than 1 tenth of what the poor person does will still have gotten enough money to buy two homes… in cash.
One thing I’ll give the Republican party is they are great at marketing. Florida’s tax code is terrible economics, downright sadistic public policy, but it sure does sound good to people who don’t have all the information. They say we have no income tax, only a sales tax, which sounds fantastic. But all taxes are income taxes; just taken out at different times. All taxes are income taxes; just aimed at different people. A sales tax still taxes your income, just when you are spending it rather than when you receive it.
In Florida, the cost of living is $50,000 a year according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. As a public school 7th grade science teacher I make $47,500 a year. I and the millions of people who make less than me must spend all of our income just to live in this state’s housing and insurance markets. When we purchase the various things we need, we pay 7.5% sales tax, the same rate as everyone else such as those in the top 1% who make over $735,000. So everyone pays the same–sounds fair, right?
But there’s an enormous and crucial difference. The astronomical cost of living in Florida means that all of my income is necessarily spent on goods or services. Besides the fact that that leaves me with nothing for leisure, emergencies, or saving for retirement, that makes the 7.5% sales tax into what is in effect a 7.5% income tax. The wealthy, because they are wealthy have the ability to spend a much smaller portion of their income on goods or services, leaving a large amount of their incomeactually untaxed. They do in fact enjoy relief from taxation on most of their income, which they can then invest in all kinds of deals only available to the wealthy and taxed at capital gains rates, far lower than Federal income tax. The richer you are, the more of your money you get to keep under a regressive tax code and so the easier it is to get even richer and then keep even more. The poorer you are, the more the government takes of the small amount of money you desperately need, making it even harder to escape poverty.
This is how our legislators attempt to trick us. They tell us we aren’t taxing your income, just sales! So if you want to earn your way up, just stop being so lazy–work more hours and buy less. Because it’s easy to become mega-rich after being super rich, they want us to think it must be easy to become well-off after being poor. They want us to think any failures to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty are the poor’s own fault. This is a lie, this regressive tax structure is designed to widen the wealth gap, not help people cross it. This Reverse-Robin Hood tax code reduces social mobility, the opposite of its purpose.
They argue that the elite work harder for their money so they deserve to keep it. Do you actually believe that? When the minimum wage is $12 an hour you’d have to work 110 hours a week to afford to live, and that would just cover survival–forget about saving money for emergencies or retirement or self improvement. My sister, a manager at McDonald’s, works harder, for longer hours, and in worse conditions than most people I’ve met; but she is somehow a lazy welfare queen deserving of scorn. While people whose work consists entirely in owning stock–just having their name connected to a bunch of numbers on a screen–they are praised as the genuinely productive contributors to society. It is not hard to see that our economic train has been pushed seriously off the rails here.
Poor Floridians are paying out more of their income to the government than any other state, while receiving almost the least in goods or services. These same services are becoming privatized just as the means to manage them properly are being undermined. Elites don’t care about the low return on investment of their taxes because they don’t rely on government services for their needs. Poorer communities who actually pay the most for these services are pulled further down as their income goes to support the wealthy. The lack of investment in poor communities and redistribution of wealth from the poorest classes to the richest classes keep people in these state mandated cycles of poverty. And it’s pricing people out of Florida.
Buying a home is no longer the American dream, it’s the American fantasy. Our state legislators allow monopolies to buy an obscene number of homes and turn them into rental properties, draining would-be-home-owners bank accounts. What had been a classic way to build wealth in this country has become just one more way to make it trickle up. And the income the elites earn from these assets they simply hold onto is completely un-taxed, unlike the income the renters earn.
There are uncountably more instances of the tax system being used to take money from the poor and give it to the rich, while advertising itself as the opposite. We need to uncover the devious nature of the systems these con-men in Tallahassee devise. Luckily there are as many problems with our tax code as there are solutions. Some from the Florida Policy Institutewould help to reign in the corporations that use & abuse the working class of our state.
If you’re not convinced that poor people should be taxed less than the elites, maybe you’ll be convinced by this: Helping poor people improve their economic condition improves the entire economy.
Firstly, it’s less efficient for the government to be supporting people through palliative fixes. Living paycheck to paycheck, with very little government services means if you get in a car crash you have no way to get to work and you lose your job and healthcare. Because of the reverse robin hood tax system you likely have no savings to support yourself so you’ll lose your home and starve. Now the government has to spend much more money saving you than it would cost to help you thrive. Ensuring people have the means to support themselves is better for everyone. Teach a man to fish, don’t take 13% of his fish, give it to a fishing monopoly, and close the fisherman’s school.
What’s worse is it puts us at a greater risk of recession. If you have no savings, the minute you are fired you are taken out of the economy. Then businesses who lose the revenue you used to bring in start closing down or firing other low-income workers. Those people then can’t spend any money on other businesses who fire more workers and on and on the recession snowball goes. But if our government just took its knee off the neck of our working families, not even necessarily supporting them but just not stealing from them, our economy would be more resistant to recession. Then if we took that minor step forward, toward a truly efficient tax code, a system that ensures all people have the opportunity to achieve and build a better life for themselves, we can see Florida Flourish.
Happily, this is a democracy. That means that the people who work for a living, who far outnumber those who own for a living, are the ones who actually rule the country. We are the ones who decide who governs us and sets the policies. If you don’t like the way policies have been going – then you can throw out the people who brought us to this point. Make them work in McDonald’s and live on that salary for a few months, and then see what they say about “livable wages” or “makers and takers.”
Things may have gone off the rails, but living in a democracy means that we can always get back on. That’s why I love this country - The United States is built on the foundation of working on its flaws and correcting its mistakes - to continually strive “to form a more perfect union.” The Founding Fathers didn’t want unthinking support of the status quo–they were the first ones to make amendments to the constitution! They designed a government that enables us to work together to keep making life better.
Right now, our tax system is keeping us from that goal, but we can turn it back into what it’s supposed to be: one of our best tools to achieve it. We need to make the tax system progressive instead of regressive, a system that helps people out of poverty instead of making sure they stay in it. We know from reams and reams of economic data that our economy does best when we have a robust middle class–people who can afford a house, who can survive a medical emergency without going bankrupt, who can send their kids to college without sacrificing their retirement. This not only is more just, it not only gives more people happy and fulfilling lives; it is necessary for a functioning, resilient economy even for the elites who don’t care about others.
I’m running for State Senate to ensure the politicians who see their jobs as catering to their corporate donor’s whims can’t steal from the working class anymore. I’m running to fix our tax system and return the economy to the people’s hands, but I can’t do it on my own. I need your help. I need your ideas, your votes, and your support. Together, we can make a more just and helpful tax code for all Floridians.
Comments