New Improved Property Tax Plan. Yeah Right!!

There was a Point of View article in the Florida Times Union today from Mark Rubio who is the Florida Speaker of the house touting the new Property Tax plan that claim to reduce local government taxing and spending, provide significant and immediate tax relief to taxpayers, and give Floridians the opportunity to vote for meaningful and comprehensive property tax reform.
What he doesn't mention is that he is taking what is currently a local tax to pay for local services such as trash pickup, libraries, public works, etc and turning it over to the state to dole out. What you are going to end up seeing every year is a parade of county officials going to Tallahassee with hat in hand to beg the state to give their money back to them. Sometimes they will, sometimes they wont. Anyone familiar with politics knows that whoever controls the purse strings controls the policy. How many times have we seen the Feds extort policy changes out of the states by threatening to withhold highway funds, many times for issues that had nothing to do with roads.
Next he goes into his formula that confronts what he says in the state's biggest problem: unaffordable and unfair property taxes.
Florida's House doesn't know what high property taxes are. Here in Duval county I pay 1.81825% of my property value in taxes. In my hometown of Syracuse, NY it is currently 2.61583%. ...and their economy stinks too.
Under his proposal 80% of the first $300,000 of value is exempt, 70% of the next $700,000 and 30% on properties over a million. Oh happy day, this is great!! That means that your average $300,000 home that currently pays $5000/yr in taxes is now only going to pay $1090.90.
Hang on buster, this is the government that we're talking about!! Mr. Rubio is conveniently leaving out what the new tax rate is. He'll leave it to us to assume that it'll be the same. I'm sure that Joe Average in his $300,000 house is going to end up paying the exact amount they are paying today. What that means is that instead of paying 1.81825% of your assessed property value in taxes you're going to pay 8.3333% on the new assessed value. On the plus side the folks living in a $1,000,000 will have a tax increase from $17,727 to $22,500. If by some miracle they keep the same rate then they will also save the most because their taxes will now be $4909.28. That won't happen. How could they possibly make up the shortfall.
There are so many holes in Mr. Rubio's argument that the middle-class should take a hard, close look at this bill and then reject it outright as a power grab by the state that will turn into a classic bait-and-switch in short order. If it looks too good to be true, it is.
Keep your money local. If your county wants to change it's tax structure then that is their peragative with your input. Don't put it in the hands of the state who will use it for political leverage instead of the good of the municipalities it's meant for.