Don’t kill our golden goose, tourism’s vital job-building taxes

Economic wisdom has never been prized by our Legislature. That’s evident every time Florida tries to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by raiding bed taxes that add tourism, which employs one of every eight state workers.

While paying lip service to tourism, Legislators have always viewed the taxes hotel guests pay as a pot of gold that can be dipped into at will because tourists will come without any invitation, a perpetual income stream to which Florida is somehow entitled, an economic fountain of youth.

That seems to be the thinking behind a potential change that’s key to a debate between the House and Senate over the shape of the state budget. An accord is due by July 1. 

The legislation that rests on a long-overdue budget accord would yank three-quarters of the revenue from our tourist bed taxes – money now earmarked for spending locally to bring even more visitors – and use the proceeds to reduce local property taxes.

Old-timers will remember that Florida made such a promise to win voter approval of a lottery, saying profits would all fund education. Then they raided the existing education funds for other uses, so it was totally bait and switch. Who’s to guarantee that counties wouldn’t cut property tax levies to equal new tourist tax funds but then raise property taxes again for other uses? This proposed law, after all, is not a property tax ceiling.

But even assuming that diverted bed tax receipts did indeed reduce property taxes, this truly bad idea in the long run would cost taxpayers money.

While most visitors come to Florida unprompted, we lure some via promotions and sports facilities and convention centers that tourist tax use fuels. That tax money comes from visitors, not residents. 

Visitors who didn’t come wouldn’t pay bed taxes or support the 1,335,900 Florida jobs that are part of the tourist industry. A loss of even 3% of visitors could cost Florida 40,000 jobs and workers would draw unemployment rather than pay taxes.  

If that scenario seems overdrawn, it’s the same picture of doomsday that we painted a decade or so ago when the state was trying to cancel its spending to bring movie and TV filming here. The Legislature said our booming filming industry didn’t need incentives anymore, because filming would come regardless.

So what happened? The Legislature did kill film incentives, the industry did in fact move to other states to film, and thousands of Florida professionals who worked in movies behind the scenes lost jobs and moved to those other states. We’re still trying to get back even some of what we lost. 

But saying ‘I told you so’ doesn’t help.

So, what does Miami-Dade in particular have to lose now? We now have 155,700 people in the visitor industry, one of every nine jobs in the county. We also list 101 hotels planned to open here, which would add 17,505 hotel rooms for an additional, say, 25,000 guests a night.

But what if we stopped luring visitors? Sure, some would come anyway, invited or not. But if we cut three-quarters of local spending for tourism-building efforts, we can be sure it will cost us guests and their spending that supports all sorts of jobs.

Moreover, whatever percentage of tourists we lost, we’d also lose that same percentage of bed tax income that is sought to lower property taxes. Remember what happened in Miami-Dade during the pandemic in 2020 when half our tourist-related workers – about 70,000 of them – lost their paychecks.

Given the memory of lost filming and tourism jobs in the past, how can our Legislature possibly be serious about doing more economic mischief? Property tax cuts are fine, but not at the expense of thousands of private industry jobs. Don’t kill the goose.