As I write this column, Florida legislators are hard at work on a measure to eliminate property taxes in the state.

Really? No. But it’s forgivable to have believed that based on clickbait headlines and the wailing of county-level politicians.

What legislators actually have in front of them is a November ballot measure proposal that would

1) ask the state’s voters if they want to

2) increase the amount of the state’s so-called “homestead exemption.”

The  “homestead exemption” means that a homeowner doesn’t pay property tax on the first $X of assessed value on his or her primary residence. It doesn’t apply to second homes. It doesn’t apply to commercial properties. Just the one house you call home.

Right now, the Florida homestead exemption amount is $50,000. The proposal would raise that to $250,000.

Before going any further, let me acknowledge both my personal interest (my family recently bought a house, and the proposal would save us a LOT of money) and one likely down side of the proposal (since apartments and rental homes are commercial properties, they’d continue to be taxed, possibly at a higher rate, which would drive up rents for non-homeowners).

Now, let’s talk about the $50,000 versus $250,000 amounts. The former was established in 2008.

On a little AI-assisted searching, I find that average assessed Florida home values have increased by about 150% since 2008, and that there now about 2 million more homes in Florida than there were in 2008. In other words, a lot more homeowners are paying a lot more in property taxes than used to be the case.

In the meantime, average wages have only increased by about 35%, while inflation has driven up the prices of things Floridians buy by 75%. Which means those increased tax bills have become less affordable, even as county government budgets have continued to grow at or faster than the inflation rate. The state government has run budget surpluses since 2010.

It seems to me that SOME kind of correction is in order. Government keeps taking, and spending, more of our money, but our earnings aren’t keeping up with either that government growth or the cost of living.

To which the standard reply is that “government services will have to be cut.”

Which services?

Well, Alachua County’s government complains that it may not have enough money for “permitting and code enforcement.”

I consider that a feature, not a bug. The county demands thousands of dollars in rent (that’s what property tax basically amounts to) from my family every year … then considers it a “service” to make us bow and scrape for permission, and pay an additional bribe, for the privilege of putting, at our own expense, a shed or above-ground pool on property it says we “own.”

We’re also told that fire/rescue/police/schools, and other “essential services,” might have to be scaled back … but even if we convince ourselves those can’t be handled by the private sector, there’s no particular reason to believe that their size and cost absolutely, positively must scale ever upward, while the rest of us tighten our belts.

The alternatives on offer, should the proposal pass, all seem to be about finding ways to raise other existing taxes or impose new ones. Sales taxes, for example, which do tend to hit lower-income families harder. Or tourism-targeted taxes, which can kill that golden goose if overdone, and which are the first revenue sources to take a hit in a recession.

There’s another option, the one that’s always, under any plausible circumstance, best: Cut government spending. Even most non-anarchists understand that we suffer from FAR too much government. The best way to fix that is to stop over-funding it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In mid-April, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a legislative resolution designating June “Nuclear Family Month.”

The purpose, naturally, was to grandstand on supposedly counter-acting the annual “Pride Month” celebrations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and … well, I’m sure a few more adjectives have come along since I sat down to write this column, but I don’t know what they are … people that have become a fixture of US life over the last few decades.

Historically, though, the idea is just as “progressive” as “Pride Month,” and somewhat less historically grounded.

Here’s how the resolution begins:

“The nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children, is God’s design for familial structure and has been the bedrock of society since the creation of the world.”

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the resolution purports to be grounded in the Bible. Which, apparently, the legislators and the governor forgot to read before framing up that resolution.

The primary biblical Jewish family unit — the mishpachah or clan — was an “extended,” not “nuclear,” family. Everyone from grandparents to grandchildren to nieces, nephews, cousins, and servants lived in close proximity to each other under the supervision of  clan “patriarchs,” the alpha males of the family lines.

Globally, even outside of the biblical milieu, “extended family” units were the historial norm for millennia, for precisely the same reason that they’re less prevalent now: Economics.

The major forces that created the celebrated modern “nuclear family” were industrialization, urbanization, and prosperity.

As workers moved off of large, multi-generational feudal or family farms and into towns to work in factories and stores, their diversity of employment location, and therefore choice of where to reside, fragmented.

As they became more prosperous, they were able to acquire separate shelter for smaller groups — instead of ten people in a one-room apartment, it became three or four in a two BEDroom apartment, or perhaps a small house.

Then came the automobile, the freeway, and the suburb, at which point a young couple could, in relative (to, say, the Oregon Trail) ease, move across the country from their mothers and fathers while still expecting a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in their new environs.

The nostalgia for a 1950s “mom, dad, two kids, Chevy four-door, well-manicured lawn around a tidy cottage”  way of life is not nostalgia for “the old days,” let alone for the days shortly after “the creation of the world.” It’s nostalgia for post-World-War-2 Pasadena, California.

I see no particular reason anyone should begrudge Tennessee its own transformation — also centered around World War 2 — from a largely rural, agricultural economy to a more urban, industrial economy, with its neat suburbs and “nuclear family” arrangements.

But trying to put a moral spin on those arrangements, backdating and falsifying the history of humankind — and, to the extent we might think we know them, the decrees of God — to “own the libs” is at least as silly as the silliest “Pride Month” celebrations.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

From national politics down to local neighborhood discussion, America seems to be in full-blown moral panic about data centers.

The two main concerns voiced by both politicians and my neighbors boil down to arguments that the increasing number and size (due to the push toward resource-intensive artificial intelligence in pretty much everything) of data centers requires “too much” electricity and “too much” water.

That may be true … right now.  But will it be true a few years from now? Not likely. Why? Well, let’s look at some history.

When Henry Ford introduced his “Quadricycle” — a gasoline powered automobile mounted on bicycle wheels — in 1896, most American roads were just dirt paths. By the early 1900s, Ford and others were pumping out thousands of the new-fangled “horseless carriages.”

With the cars came the complaints: Dirt roads turned into perpetual dust clouds as “rolling firetraps” careened dangerously down them, loudly and with frequent exhaust backfires, scaring the horses which drew the “traditional” wagons and carriages. A hue and cry arose against the dangers and inconveniences of the “devil wagons.”

But then cars got quieter (as inventors introduced mufflers), their brakes got improved, and the roads got paved. Over time, people ended up with cheaper, safer, faster, and more reliable transportation. And the streets and roads stopped being large-scale dumping grounds for animal feces, arguably improving health conditions.

That process of improvement hasn’t ended yet. My wife’s 2006 SUV gets about three times as many miles per gallon (in town) as the Oldsmobile coupe I drove in my youth, and is probably a lot safer, even correcting for her “mature woman” driving skills versus my “crazy male teen” habits.

Getting a little more modern, consider computers: My Linux Mini PC, like the Commodore VIC-20 I got for Christmas in 1983, runs on 20-25 watts of electricity. But the mini PC — which cost about 1/3 as much as the Commodore after accounting for inflation — boasts three million times as much RAM and runs about 3,000 times as fast.

Yes, data centers use a lot of water.

Yes, data centers use a lot of electricity.

But the builders of those data centers are constantly working to reduce water and electrical requirements because supplying those requirements is costly.

Unless there’s some really bizarre change to the historical arc of invention and innovation, we are at the peak, not the low point, of data center resource usage.

In fact, shortly before I began writing this column, Wired ran an article on a recent innovation by Amazon that “delivers 33 percent higher data throughput, cuts network power consumption by 40 percent, and lowers operating costs by 27 percent.”

Future CPUS and their associated equipment will run faster (meaning fewer are needed for the same jobs), cooler (meaning less water is needed to cool them), and on less electricity.

Those innovations won’t just benefit the operators of data centers. Regular consumers will also see cheaper, faster, better products at the retail level — and lower utility bills to boot.

The future is always scary … until it actually gets here.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY