Miami Herald attacks Florida property-tax caps

Miami Herald’s editorial board has discovered, with a certain late-arriving innocence, that Florida’s property-tax regime is not a neutral way to fund local government but a long-running wealth-transfer machine — and that “tax cuts” can be engineered to sound liberating while quietly shifting the bill to people least able to dodge it.

The immediate target is Florida’s patchwork of homestead exemptions and assessment caps, most famously the “Save Our Homes” cap that limits annual increases in assessed value for primary residences. According to the Miami Herald, these rules increasingly function as a subsidy for incumbent homeowners: long-tenured owners see their taxable value drift far below market value, while newcomers — and anyone without a homestead — pay closer to the real price of living in the same county.

This is not merely a fairness argument; it’s a political economy argument. A tax base that protects voters who reliably show up at the polls (older homeowners) while leaning harder on people who don’t (renters, younger households, newer arrivals) is an almost perfect machine for municipal survival. Local governments can claim they are “keeping taxes low” for residents, then make up the difference through higher millage on non-homesteaded property and through fees: insurance-like special assessments, utility charges, stormwater fees, and the endless menu of “we’re not raising taxes” line items that still drain the same bank account.

The editorial points out a second-order effect that rarely makes it into campaign slogans: renters pay property tax too, just indirectly. Landlords price taxes into rent, and when non-homesteaded assessments rise faster than capped homestead properties, the burden migrates into monthly payments. The state can therefore celebrate homeowner relief while the rental market becomes the pressure valve.

And because Florida’s local budgets are heavily property-tax dependent, the system also encourages a familiar municipal addiction: ever-higher valuations, ever-more development, and ever-more political theater about “affordability.” Governments can posture as defenders of the middle class while designing a structure that punishes mobility — moving is fiscally irrational if your tax basis is artificially low — and rewards those already inside the gate.

The lesson is not that Tallahassee should “fix” property taxes with a new statewide scheme. It’s that the state’s favorite kind of tax is one you can’t easily see, can’t easily avoid, and can plausibly blame on “the market.” Property taxes are billed once or twice a year, but the incentives are collected daily: in distorted housing choices, frozen neighborhoods, and a renter class paying for homeowner politics.

If Florida wants a tax cut that isn’t a rhetorical device, it would start by reducing the spending that property taxes fund — and by stopping the shell game where “relief” for one constituency is financed by quietly marking up everyone else’s cost of shelter.