Dwight Eisenhower once warned that “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” It was his way of reminding leaders that big ideas succeed or fail long before they reach the battlefield.
Florida now finds itself considering an $18.3 billion repeal of homestead property taxes, with neither the plan nor the planning needed to hold the system together. It is the policy equivalent of removing a load-bearing wall with no structural review and simply assuming the building will absorb the strain.
At first glance, the idea is seductive. Who wouldn’t want to stop paying property taxes? But after a year of speeches, tweets and standing ovations, the Governor has produced exactly zero spreadsheets, zero fiscal models and zero back-of-the-napkin calculations to show how it would work. Florida is being asked to consider the largest structural change to local government finance in state history without a plan, a blueprint, or a single line of analysis.
Yet Tallahassee treats this as serious policy, rather than what it is: a slogan with an $18.3 billion price tag no one has seen.
The timing is telling. Florida faces projected deficits of $1.5 billion in 2027 and $6.6 billion in 2028, figures that arrive just as the current administration leaves office. Credit is claimed today while lawmakers inherit the wreckage tomorrow. The Revenue Estimating Conference, an institution that rarely exaggerates, projects an $18.3 billion annual hole in city and county budgets.
That estimate assumes no behavioral response, but in the real world, behavior always changes.
Remove property taxes in a state with no income tax and unlimited homestead bankruptcy protection and Florida becomes the nation’s premier tax shelter. Housing demand surges. Prices rise. New residents use essential services but do not pay for them.
Someone always pays.
Renters will pay through higher rents. New buyers will pay through inflated prices. Small businesses will pay through higher commercial rates. Cities will push millage rates to their statutory limits and increase fees in the code, including stormwater, fire, garbage and permitting. These costs compound quietly and fall hardest on households without a homestead cap.
Local governments will not announce dramatic cuts to public safety. They will simply quietly stop hiring A mid-sized Florida police department that needs 22 new officers to match population growth will hire 8. Not because crime fell but because no one commits to long-term payroll when revenue is collapsing. This is how public safety erodes: not with sirens but with empty patrol shifts.
The state promises to backfill the lost revenue. With what? The same budget projected to run billions in the red? For how long? By what formula? Guaranteed by which statute? Enforced by which future Governor? Occam’s Razor offers the most straightforward answer: there is no plan because the math does not work.
And if that were not already apparent, consider the veto. The Governor eliminated the one study designed to answer these questions. Leaders do not bury analysis unless they fear the conclusion. That veto was not an act of strength. It was concealment.
Beyond cities and counties, Florida has over 100 special districts that rely heavily on property taxes, including fire districts, hospital districts, water management districts, children’s services and library systems. Eliminating homestead revenue would destabilize many of them at once, and no one in Tallahassee can say which would endure or what services would be lost, because the analysis has never been done.
Legislative leadership must halt the charade. If the Governor wants a Special Session, suspend all work on this proposal during the Regular Session. The House and Senate should make clear they will not spend floor time, Committee hours, or political capital on a concept without numbers.
Let the Governor issue the call. When he does, demand what has been avoided for a year: a written plan supported by modeling, assumptions, trade-offs and county-by-county impacts.
A responsible tax system is broad, stable, neutral and transparent. Eliminating homestead property taxes meets none of these criteria. It narrows the base, destabilizes budgets, shifts burdens into rents and fees, and severs voters from the cost of the services they demand. It is not conservative. It is not reform. It is not governance.
Florida already faces real crises. Property insurance. Prisons. Housing affordability. Water quality. Workforce shortages. These are the storms gathering on the horizon. Legislators should focus on those, rather than reinventing local finance with a slogan and a shrug.
The path forward is simple. Require a written plan with real math. Convene a special Impact Estimating Conference under section 216.138 of the Florida Statutes, for the analysis that was previously blocked. Until that happens, freeze consideration of this proposal and wait for a formal Special Session call.
In the end, the Legislature is being asked to hard-wire a constitutional amendment into Florida’s future with no schematics, no modeling and no answers, only a cheerful sketch and an eighteen-billion-dollar blind spot. Florida deserves a plan drawn by an architect who intends to live in the building, not a departing contractor waving around a crayon and calling it destiny.
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Former Sen. Jeff Brandes is the founder of the Florida Policy Project.