On Nov. 1, Colorado voters will be asked to weaken the state’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR.
Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, a Republican, has been a champion for controlling government growth and spending, and the 1992 TABOR has helped him achieve that record. The law not only sets a low limit for state spending growth, it requires the state to pay refunds to taxpayers on all surplus revenues.
Once state revenues began to exceed the limit in 1997, Colorado taxpayers received $3.2 billion in tax rebates over the next five years.
But the recent economic recession changed all of that. Colorado lawmakers now say they need money for schools, health care, public safety workers’ pension funds and transportation projects.
But rather than offsetting that spending with cuts elsewhere, they’re asking voters for permission to spend all TABOR revenues collected in the next five years.
In order to gain public support, Gov. Owens has just sent letters to the policy community defending his limited-government bona fides, but calling for a time out. “The simple fact is that Colorado needs to use TABOR [funds] to complete our recovery from the recession – and preserve TABOR for years to come.”
Gov. Owens’ sound a little reminiscent of FDR’s rationale for creating lots of new government programs in order to save capitalism from the Depression.
The letter also claims that Jon Caldara, president of the Colorado-based Independence Institute, and former Senate President John Andrews, both of whom strongly oppose Referenda C and D, are wrong.
We can’t help but be reminded that, last year, Alabama’s governor and legislature told their residents that the only way to balance the state’s books was with revenue increases, and that it was impossible to solve the problem through spending cuts. But, once Alabama voters rejected the revenue increases at the ballot box, the state magically seemed to find sufficient spending cuts to solve the problem.
The good news for representative government is that Colorado voters will decide this fight on Nov. 1 instead of having it forced on them by lawmakers.
If the voters pass the legislation and it serves to undermine TABOR, both for themselves and for the growing TABOR movement in other states, they won’t have anyone to blame but themselves.