Florida taxpayers have paid a consultant $40,000 so far to tell them to cut wasteful tax spending. This could only be brought to us by that great brain trust, Republican state legislators.
To date, the consultant has produced 35 pages of deliverables for her fee — that’s $1,143 per page. Fifteen of those pages were an early draft of a report that was finalized at 16 pages, plus three pages of projections under various tax scenarios.
And not just any consultant, either.
Donna Arduin, former advisor to Jeb Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, is at it again, according to investigative reporter Shirish Date (pronounced DAH-tay).
Arduin…is a partner in a consulting firm with Arthur Laffer – as in the Laffer Curve, the justification of President Reagan’s massive tax cuts in 1981 – and Stephen Moore, former head of the anti-tax Club for Growth.
Florida is paying the firm of Arduin, Laffer and Moore Econometrics $10,000 a month under a six-month contract with the state House for Arduin’s service, which so far has included delivery of a 16-page treatise that argues that taxes on wealth are bad for the economy while taxes on consumption are good…
[House Speaker Marco] Rubio spokeswoman Jill Chamberlin said Arduin also has given oral advice to Rubio and other House leaders on numerous occasions…
Arduin did not return phone calls for this article.
Rubio, on Arduin’s advice, has proposed that Florida do away with property taxes and instead up the state sales tax. And up it. And up it.
The plan is so bad that the St. Petersburg Times said, “Better ideas have been drawn up on cocktail napkins as bartenders served a final round.”
Others are more specific.
“It’s the same old discredited nonsense of supply-side economics,” said Brice Nissen, a Florida International University professor and head of the Center for Labor Research and Studies there. “It would be a massive giveaway to the most wealthy.”
Ed Montanaro, formerly the state’s chief economist and now a professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin, said most government economists prefer to spread tax sources across income, wealth and transactions to keep the revenue stream as stable as possible…
“This is an ideological shift, not a pragmatic one,” Montanaro said of Arduin and Rubio’s new proposal. “Those boring little details that ideologues don’t often have patience for are the difference between effective, efficient government and chaotic government.”
Date is also an author, and his latest book is JEB: America’s Next Bush.
