December 9, 2024
Ed Dean
Every year, the James Madison Institute (JMI) releases policy positions for the upcoming Florida Legislative Session.
The group, which advocates limited government, has announced a few initiatives they want to see state lawmakers tackle in 2025.
On education, JMI says they want to see education freedom promoted more at the local level by ensuring that public school buildings no longer in use are made available first to education entrepreneurs (traditional private schools, micro and/or hybrid schools, a la carte course providers, learners’ markets, etc.) before being demolished or sold to others.
- Promote education freedom at the state level by protecting the wide flexibility of Florida’s Personalized Education Program (PEP) scholarships and by lifting regulatory restrictions on online providers, hybrid schools, and other emerging education enterprises. On the national level, JMI wants to see Enhanced Child Tax Credit adopted for families that take financial responsibility for their children’s education and by converting the federal Title I program into a block grant that Florida could use to fund weighted scholarships for students living in low-income neighborhoods.
- Protect interchange fee agreements.
- Oppose efforts to interfere with business-to-business contracts through government initiatives seeking to sever the sales tax from interchange fees. These government overreach efforts to create a new tax-collecting regime with severe penalties for enforcement create the potential for unwarranted consumer privacy concerns and restrict the availability of credit for Floridians.
- Eliminating interchange fees could potentially impose new obligations on networks and providers, create novel liabilities such as dual transactions, and present implementation challenges.
- Protect enacted reforms within Florida’s property insurance arena and advance necessary reforms to the reinsurance market. Ensure that reforms passed in 2022 and 2023 are allowed to continue to stabilize the market and counter Florida’s frivolous litigation environment.
- Protect competition and property rights in the live event ticket market. Ensure that individuals purchasing tickets to live events in Florida, like sports, concerts, or other events, are able to fully exercise their rights to donate or sell their tickets in a secondary/resale market without restrictions from monopoly actors in the market.
- Healthcare: Encourage healthcare price transparency.
- Allow individuals to price-shop for nonemergency and/or elective procedures and either keep a portion of the savings (from insurance reimbursement rate) or allow it to be put toward their annual deductible. Increase health insurance choice and competition. Allow individuals to purchase qualified health insurance plans offered in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and other US Territories
- Reform Florida’s communication service tax. Extend the prohibition on municipalities increasing the local CST rate beyond 2026. Increase transparency on how municipalities spend revenue generated through the CST.
