The Case Against Mandatory Minimum Tourism Subsidies is Simultaneously the Case Against Mandatory Minimum Drug Laws
Some people argue that if Florida spends a mandatory minimum number of tax dollars annually to promote tourism, then the supply of tourists in Florida will rise. This increased supply of tourists will, in turn, lead to economic benefits that would not exist but for the mandatory minimum tourism subsidies. Thanks to these unique benefits, the argument goes, spending tax dollars to promote tourism is not wasteful. Rather, it is an investment in Florida’s economy that pays for itself, and then some.
Legislators have debated in recent years whether Florida law should continue to spend a mandatory minimum amount of tax dollars to subsidize tourism. On one side, proponents of mandatory minimum tourism subsidies credit those subsidies for the fact that the number of tourists who visit Florida has increased every year since 2009, including record numbers in each of the past two years. They argue that eliminating tourism subsidies, or even rolling back the mandatory minimum amount of tax dollars spent on them, risks these hard-fought economic gains.
On the other side, opponents of mandatory minimum tourism subsidies question whether tourism subsidies are an efficient use of tax dollars. Some call mandatory minimum tourism subsidies “corporate welfare,” and point to the lack of transparency and accountability in the administration of tourism subsidies. They point to unintended consequences, like lavish contracts with celebrities that yield little to no economic benefit in return. They dispute claims of a causal connection between mandatory minimum tourism subsidies and higher tourism numbers.
Other people argue that if a statute requires that anyone convicted of a “drug trafficking” offense serves a mandatory minimum number of years in prison, then the supply of drug traffickers will fall. The reduced supply of drug traffickers will, in turn, lead to public safety benefits that would not exist but for the mandatory minimum sentencing laws (e.g., a reduced supply of controlled substances, fewer people addicted to controlled substances, fewer overdose deaths, and less drug-related crime generally). Thanks to these unique benefits, the argument goes, spending tax dollars to enforce mandatory minimum drug laws is not wasteful. Rather, it is an investment in Florida’s safety that pays for itself, and then some.
Legislators have debated in recent years whether Florida law should continue to mandate a minimum number of years served in prison for committing a drug trafficking offense. On one side, proponents of mandatory minimum drug laws credit those laws with the significant drop in Florida’s crime rate over the past three decades. They argue that eliminating mandatory minimum drug laws, or even reducing the mandatory minimum number of years a person must serve for a drug trafficking conviction, risks these hard-fought public safety gains.
On the other side, opponents of mandatory minimum drug laws question whether those laws are an efficient use of tax dollars. Some call mandatory minimum drug laws “prosecutorial welfare” — OK, they don’t, because I just made that up, but maybe they will now! — and point to the lack of transparency and accountability in their administration of mandatory minimum drug laws. They point to unintended consequences, like low-level offenders and drug users given prison sentences intended for kingpins, which yield little to no public safety benefit in return. They dispute claims of a causal connection between mandatory minimum drug laws and lower crime rates.
Discriminating readers will notice that the arguments for mandatory minimum tourism subsidies and the arguments for mandatory minimum drug laws are identical.
Here’s that argument in a nutshell:
First, proponents of the relevant mandatory minimum identify laudable goals, and then conflate those goals with their preferred means of achieving them. In the first case, the laudable goals are increased tourism and higher economic growth; the means is mandatory minimum tourism subsidies. In the other, the laudable goals are reduced drug supply, reduced drug overdose deaths, and reduced drug-related crime; the means is mandatory minimum drug laws.
Second, proponents of the relevant mandatory minimum argue that any positive outcomes since their preferred means were adopted are the result of their preferred means. In the first case, those positive outcome is record high tourism. In the second, the positive outcome is record low crime.
Finally, proponents of the relevant mandatory minimum paint nightmare scenarios of doom and gloom that will occur if their preferred mandatory minimum is reduced or eliminated. In the first case, they say the repeal or reduction of mandatory minimum tourism subsidies will lead to the destruction of Florida’s tourism industry, and by extension the destruction of the state economy as a whole. In the second, they say the repeal or reduction of mandatory minimum drug laws will lead back to the days of “Cocaine Cowboys” killing each other with machine guns in shopping malls.
In a recent op-ed for the Tampa Bay Times, Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva made a persuasive case against mandatory minimum tourism subsidies. In that piece, Speaker Oliva rejects the idea that mandatory minimum tourism subsidies are responsible for Florida’s tourist boom, observing that, “tourism numbers tend to run countercyclical to VISIT Florida’s budget, demonstrating conclusively that there is no correlation between dollars to VISIT Florida and number of tourists visiting.”
Then, Speaker Oliva asks the right question:
What is the impact of losing — at worst — $30 million in taxpayer funded marketing? If the answer is, a significant impact, that would force us to rethink our position on the agency. However if the answer is negligible to nothing, that would force us to rethink whether funding is necessary at all and what other state priorities could use that $30 million annually. Children and Families? Medicaid? Veterans?
He answers his own question, arguing that:
. . . [T]he loss of, at most, $30 million in what is at least a multibillion dollar marketing effort benefitting Florida annually is by no means the Vesuvian Doomsday that recent editorials made it out to be.
(Note: “Vesuvian Doomsday” is a great phrase and I am going to steal it.)
Anyway, since the argument for mandatory minimum tourism subsidies is identical to the argument for mandatory minimum drug laws, we can apply Speaker Oliva’s reasoning about mandatory minimum tourism subsidies equally to mandatory minimum drug laws.
There are no good reasons to believe that mandatory minimum drug laws are even partly responsible for Florida’s crime drop. First, crime in Florida rose for more than a decade after mandatory minimum drug laws were originally imposed in 1979, and started falling just shy of a decade prior to the reinstatement of mandatory minimum drug laws in 1999. Moreover, crime has fallen everywhere, including in other states, like Texas, that do not use mandatory minimum drug laws, and in states that once used them, but repealed them. These facts demonstrate conclusively that, at the very least, there is no stronger correlation between mandatory minimum drug laws and crime than there is between VISIT Florida’s budget and Florida’s tourism numbers.
In fact, the case for mandatory minimum tourism subsidies is significantly stronger than the case for mandatory minimum drug laws. Proponents of mandatory minimum tourism subsidies can at least point to higher tourism numbers over the past two decades. Supporters of mandatory minimum drug laws can’t point to anything that suggests those laws have achieved even a single one of their intended goals. After all, since 1999, drug trafficking arrests, drug trafficking prison admissions, and drug-related overdose deaths have all increased significantly, exactly the opposite of what proponents of mandatory minimum drug laws said would happen. (One might say such variables are “countercyclical to the enforcement of mandatory minimum drug laws.”)
What is the impact of eliminating or rolling back Florida’s mandatory minimum drug laws? If the answer is, a significant impact, that would force FAMM and the dozens of other organizations across the ideological spectrum that support mandatory minimum reform to rethink our position on such laws. However if the answer is negligible to nothing, that would force others to rethink whether mandatory minimum laws are necessary at all and what other state priorities could use the tens of millions spent enforcing such laws annually. Children and Families? Medicaid? Veterans?
Of course, we can’t know with certainty what would happen to drug abuse and crime if we eliminated or rolled back mandatory minimum drug laws any more than we can know for sure what would happen to Florida’s economy if we eliminated mandatory minimum tourism subsidies. However, we do have some idea about what would happen if we eliminated or rolled back mandatory minimum drug laws, because that’s exactly what Florida did in 1993.
That year, the Legislature (including a GOP-controlled state Senate) repealed “most minimum mandatory sentences located in the Florida Statutes.” Between FY 1993–94 and FY 1998–99, the number of prison admissions with mandatory sentences fell 56 percent in Florida. A 1999 review found strong evidence that the repeal had not caused a crime spike. In fact, the state crime rate fell nearly 26 percent. As Sal Nuzzo and I point out in our 2019 James Madison Institute policy brief:
Florida’s 1998 crime rate [was] the lowest since 1978, and [had] declined for seven consecutive years. The state’s “index crime rate,” including murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, [was] 23.5 percent lower than in 1988. Violent crimes declined by 16.4 percent in the last 10 years. The state’s violent crime rate has declined for six consecutive years.
Other states have had similar experiences. When New York repealed its “Rockefeller Drug Laws,” on which Florida’s drug sentencing laws are modeled, some of the law enforcement special interest groups painted their own “Vesuvian Doomsday” scenarios (great phrase!), warning state legislators that repealing mandatory minimums would “turn back years of hard work and progress we have made in combating crime in our communities and will increase costs for the state by untold millions of dollars,” and lead to a “a public safety disaster.”
But a decade after the repeal, the Chicken Little predictions had proven false. As Sal and I noted:
New York’s violent crime and property crime rates are both down since 2008. 2017 was “the safest year in decades” in New York City, with a murder rate lower than any in the previous 70 years. Drug abuse did not spiral out of control, either. From 2009–2017, New York’s fatal drug overdose rate was nearly 20 percent lower than the national rate.
(Florida’s was higher than the national average over the same period.)
Other states’ experiences throw cold water on the claims that repealing mandatory minimums means going back to high crime days. Michigan repealed its “650-Lifer” mandatory minimum drug laws in 2003. Since then the state has released thousands of drug offenders, and saved tens of millions in unnecessary corrections costs. Violent crime fell more than 20 percent in Michigan between 2002 and 2014. Property crime fell nearly 40 percent over the same period, and Michigan’s recidivism rate hit an all-time low in 2018, down from more than 45 percent in 1998.
Pennsylvania’s mandatory minimum drug laws were struck down as unconstitutional in 2015. Since then crime’s fallen 15 percent. Louisiana repealed its mandatory minimum drug laws in 2017, and all is well! The violent crime rate there fell three percent in 2018, and the murder rate fell eight percent. Criminologists credit at least part of that drop to reinvestment from the 2017 reforms.
So, we know to a near certainty that when states repeal mandatory minimum drug laws, the impact on crime and drug abuse is not only “negligible to nothing,” it actually improves public safety by allowing the reinvestment of tens of millions of tax dollars that are now just utterly wasted into strategies that actually work!
In his op-ed, Speaker Oliva correctly points out that, “Recognition that marketing works and at the same time questioning the necessity and efficacy of VISIT Florida are not incongruous.” Similarly, recognition that incarceration often works and at the same time questioning the necessity and efficacy of mandatory minimum drug laws are not incongruous. In fact, despite whatever public safety gains have been made by relying on incarceration generally — to deny there have been any such gains is unreasonable — the evidence is nevertheless overwhelming that Florida’s drug sentencing laws are wasteful, inefficient, ineffective, and counterproductive to public safety. The only prudent move is to repeal them. The only defensible move is to roll them back significantly.
The case against mandatory minimum tourism subsidies is simultaneously the case against mandatory minimum drug laws. It is impossible to reject the arguments made on behalf of mandatory minimum tourism subsidies, but at the same time accept the same arguments on behalf of mandatory minimum drug laws.
At least, it’s impossible to do so and remain principled, consistent, and intellectually honest.
