Tallahassee, Fla – Today, Florida TaxWatch released its 2024 UPDATE: Are Floridians Ready to Go Back to School? Not Without More Teachers, an analysis of […]
Where and how well our school districts spend our education dollars can have a profound impact on student academic achievement and success. Historically, education makes up about one-fourth of Florida’s total budget. Florida TaxWatch believes that shifting education spending away from administrative and other expenses and toward classroom/instructional expenses is beneficial.
With an addition of 257,000 jobs in 2016, Florida continues to rise from the Great Recession. Over the past year, nearly all of Florida’s major industries have seen employment gains, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.8.
For 2016, Florida received an overall score of 72.4 points, a grade of C-, and an overall rank of 30th.
The House and Senate passed their respective state budgets for FY2016-17 with four weeks remaining in the 2016 Session. They will now go into the budget conference process to negotiate the differences. Conference meetings could start as early as this week (the week of February 22).
With the looming sunset of the sales tax exemption on manufacturing equipment threatening to harm Florida’s economy, Florida TaxWatch testified before the Legislature to extend the tax exemption. The exemption on manufacturing equipment allows manufacturers to reinvest the money they would have given to the state back into their business. This promotes growth in the manufacturing industry and creates high salary jobs.
Governor Rick Scott’s budget recommendations for FY2016-17 total $79.252 billion—an increase of 1.1 percent ($855.1 million) over current year spending. General Revenue (GR) spending of $29.260 billion would be an increase of 1.4 percent over the current year. The budget proposes to fund 112,823 state employee positions, 864 fewer than currently exist.
Introduction Many in the Florida Legislature have been rightly criticizing local governments for rapidly increasing property taxes and budgets. The property tax debate and the
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, April 14, 2026 CONTACT: Christina Johnson Tallahassee, Fla. – Florida TaxWatch announced today that Friday, April 17 is Florida Taxpayer Independence Day (TID) 2026. This
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, August 28, 2025 CONTACT: Christina Johnson Tallahassee, Fla. – Today, Florida TaxWatch released a report Government Efficiency Should Not Be Something We Only Do Every
For over 45 years, donor support has made Florida TaxWatch the state’s leading independent voice for taxpayer accountability. There are many ways to support our mission.
