Tag: Colorado

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

Money, Money, Money

Money. Politicians like to spend it. People — especially special interests — like to get it. And taxpayers really don’t much like having to pay for all that spending.

So our representatives try to procrastinate their balancing of spending and revenue. How? With debt. Hence our yearly unbalanced budgets.

At the federal level, deficits soar. Many states, however, have constitutional spending limitations and balanced budget requirements. What difference do such limits make?

Well, Professor Barry Poulson, of the Independence Institute, points out that a few years before Colorado passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (or TABOR), limiting state spending growth to the increase in population plus inflation, California’s legislature was abandoning the GANN Amendment, a similar limit.

Says Poulson, “Over the period since TABOR was passed, Colorado has experienced one of the highest rates of economic growth in the nation, while California has experienced retardation in economic growth.”

Two states — Maine and Washington — have initiatives on their ballot this November that are very similar to Colorado’s TABOR. The special interest opponents to these measures, most notably government employee unions, have raised millions more than supporters. Soon voters will be pummeled with ads claiming that the sky will fall if there is any limit on state spending growth.

Of course, the fiscal sky has already fallen. Voters should support these measures as the best way to pick up the pieces.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall tax policy

They Call It “De-Brucing”

Colorado’s constitutional amendment dubbed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, has made it difficult for politicians to tax and spend like they want.

So politicians engage in all sorts of weird strategems.

Take “de-Brucing.” TABOR’s author is Doug Bruce. TABOR allows voters to make exceptions to the law’s basic limits on spending increases and taxes. So all but four of Colorado’s 178 school districts have voted to “de-Bruce” — that is, to allow more spending, more taxes, than TABOR’s formula would otherwise allow.

In this context, Gov. Bill Ritter worked hard promoting a 2007 law to freeze tax rates. This freeze was designed not to limit increasing tax revenues, but to shore up the pre-TABOR rate of increase. It passed.

What the freeze did was de-Bruce the whole state, even those four school districts that had repeatedly and enthusiastically upheld tax rate reductions created by TABOR.

And now the state supreme court has decided that Ritter’s legal maneuver is just hunky dory.

In Colorado, voters engage in lawful constitutional revisions, and politicians react with obvious unconstitutional law . . . and are backed up by the highest court. So much for constitutionality.

If I lived in Colorado, I’d be voting not to “de-Bruce,” but to “de-Ritter” . . . and be thinking about term limits for judges.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability government transparency

Opaque Transparency

Colorado’s state treasurer, Cary Kennedy, is on the hot seat. When running for office, she promised to make the state’s spending more transparent. She has not followed through.

In a different age, such dilatoriness might have been overlooked. Today, the very medium that makes it easy to report what is happening with taxpayers’ money, the Internet, also makes it easy to pressure delinquent officials.

There are websites. The one calling Kennedy to account is a blog called Colorado Spending Transparency. Or COST.

COST recalls that during his 2006 campaign for Colorado State Treasurer, Kennedy observed that when you buy groceries, the receipt shows what you bought. Kennedy, too, she said, would “show you where your money goes.”

Colorado does post its annual budget online. But the COST blog wants a detailed, searchable database, as fifteen other states have provided.

Representative Don Marostica, who also championed transparency in his 2006 campaign, introduced a bill to require such online itemizing. The bill never made it out of committee. Marostica had planned to re-introduce the bill until Governor Ritter stated in a recent speech that he would work with Treasurer Kennedy and others to put the state’s checkbook online.

COST says doing this will only reveal what the state paid, not necessarily what it paid for. COST wants the whole story. And will keep pressing until it gets it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.