Gov. Bill Owens and former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey of Texas debated this fall’s budget-reform package Tuesday night, Owens arguing for it and Armey against it.
It was about 30 minutes of fairly amicable quarreling – a stark contrast to the sharper tone set by Armey and other small-government crusaders at a Capitol news conference they had called earlier in the day to kick off their opposition campaign.
Armey, who now travels the country in support of conservative causes for a group called FreedomWorks, said he had come to Colorado to protect the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
The budget reforms offered by Referendums C and D on the November ballot propose a five-year suspension of TABOR, which limits taxes. They also seek to make it easier for government to recover from future periods of recession.
Owens said he hopes to make TABOR stronger while allowing for recovery from what he called “a real crisis in the state of Colorado.”
His goal is to leave Colorado’s next governor with a state government that works, he said.
“What I’m trying to do is not for me,” he said. “It’s not for my administration. I’m not going to be here but for 18 more months. But it’s really for the future of Colorado.”
As the system works today, current government shortfalls are guaranteed to worsen over time, he said. About two-thirds of the state’s budget – Medi caid and K-12 education – will continue to outpace tax revenues, he said.
State spending on Medicaid is “mostly a congressional mandate,” and K-12 increases are required by Amendment 23 – regardless of how much tax revenue comes into the state, he said.
“Almost two-thirds of our budget goes up, even when we have revenue go down,” he said. “So what I propose is, now that the economy is coming back, … like 49 other states, we ought to be able to benefit from that growing economy and start to make back some of what was lost during this recession.”
But Armey sees the proposal that Owens and majority Democrats hammered out this year as an assault on TABOR – the country’s “first and best example of restraining against growth in big government.”
More revenue will only encourage the development of new programs, he said. If they approve the five-year hiatus, taxpayers should expect to hear government officials ask for an extension down the line, he said.
“I think one of the things the taxpayers intuitively understand is, once you let the government learn a bad habit, they’ll repeat the bad habit,” he said.
Armey said he had been invited to the state by local FreedomWorks members to help make the case that TABOR’s current limits on taxation should be left alone.
“My theory is, leave the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in place, with its restraint on growth,” he said. “In the long run, the state will be better off. Give people the tax rebates that they earned.”
Though Owens said that tight budgets of recent years already have forced as many spending cuts as are reasonable, Armey disagreed.
“Governor, I know how hard you work, and I know how hard it is, but the fact of the matter is, there’s always room for further tightening the belt in any government budget,” he said. “I promise you.”
At their Capitol news conference earlier in the day, Armey and his local allies in the fight against Referendums C and D were more directly critical of Owens. They accused him of leaving the fold of fiscal conservatives.
“All of a sudden, he’s drinking backslider’s wine, it seems, by the gallon,” Armey said then.
After Tuesday night’s debate at the KBDI-Channel 12 studio, scheduled to be broadcast today at 9 p.m. and again Friday at 9:30 p.m., Owens said he does not take the criticisms personally.
But it does bother him that advocates for TABOR-like proposals in other states have designed their tax controls a little differently to avoid the very problem Colorado is now facing, he said.
“What’s frustrating to me is, I’m trying to do what conservative groups around the country are saying you should do, and we’re doing it through a vote of the people,” he said. “And they’re saying, you know, that I’ve broken faith.”
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
