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It all started with junk mail...

I'm Canadian.

 

That's maybe the most interesting detail about me, so I'm going to lead with that. Born in Toronto and raised in Guelph (the Royal City!)...Although if I'm being truly honest, I've been in Florida now longer than I ever lived up north and I've really never been a good skater. But I've still got a passport with a maple leaf on it, it counts! 

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I've also been a journalist for nearly 20 years now. I started as junior cops reporter in a small bureau for the Orlando Sentinel, back when local newspapers still had bureaus. I later became a government reporter (including a few years in Tallahassee covering the Florida Legislature) and then a business reporter (covering the Walt Disney Co. and the global theme-park industry). And today I'm a hybrid of both, writing about the ways businesses influence public policy for the Orlando Sentinel (and our sister paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, in Fort Lauderdale).  

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My particular area of expertise is tax policy. I'm often asked about how I ended up writing so much about taxes, and I can actually trace it back to pretty much the exact moment. It was about 15 years ago, and I had recently started covering state government. I was sitting in a committee hearing, when the committee I was watching took up some arcane bill with the snooze-inducing title, "An Act Relating to an Exemption from the Tax on Sales, Use and Other Transactions." But as I listened to the discussion, and read through the bill, I realized the bill was a tax break for Valpak -- the junk-mail company that sends out blue envelopes stuffed with random coupons. Valpak had a printing operation near Tampa and it didn't really want to pay sale tax anymore on all the materials it had to buy. 

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From that moment on, I devoted my career in journalism to understanding and explaining how businesses shape government policy -- particularly tax policy, which is, after all, entirely about taking money away or giving money to someone. And tax policy is *all* policy. It determines how much policymakers can spend on healthcare or schools or parks or roads, and it shapes the structural barriers that affect who accumulates wealth and influence and who is left stuck behind. 

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My work has won more than a dozen state and national awards over the years, for investigative reporting, business coverage, even profile writing. In 2020, I won a National Headliner Award for "Big Profits, Tiny Taxes," a six-part series examining how multinational corporations avoid Florida taxes and what Florida policymakers could do to stop them -- if they wanted to. 

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You'll find lots of them on this website. And they're not all about taxes! To this day, the most fun I've ever had writing a story was this one about a broken abominable snowman at Disney

 

Whether you like what you read here or not, I'd love to hear from you. I can be reached anytime at Garcia.JasonR@gmail.com. So please feel free to send any questions, comments or story ideas.

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Thanks so much for reading. 

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jason

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#suppportlocaljournalism 

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