South Florida Times: State Policies Affect the Middle Class

By David Madland and Keith Miller, June 5, 2014

The past 30 years has not been kind to Florida’s middle class which now ranks among the weakest in the nation. While the state enjoyed significant economic growth over this period, few of the benefits ever trickled down to the families who were not among the state’s highest earnersAccording to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), the net effect of these choices is that the bottom 20 percent of Floridians ended up paying roughly 13.2 percent of their income in state and local taxes in 2013, while the top one percent paid only 2.3 percent. Indeed, ITEP ranks Florida’s tax system as the second most regressive in the entire nation, behind only Washington state..

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Today, middle-class Floridians’ incomes are lower than they were in the late 1980s and their share of the state’s total economic pie has fallen to near-record lows. These trends are reversible but it will require the undoing of several decades of policies that have consistently favored those at the top over those in the middle and at the bottom.

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