November’s ballot proposals to suspend the spending limits imposed by the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights will take $31 billion out of Coloradans’ pockets over the next 25 years, according to a study released Tuesday by opponents of Referendums C and D.
The estimate comes from Paul Prentice, an agribusiness consultant who lectures in the MBA program at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Top state economists dispute the figure, but political analysts said the new estimate of the cost to taxpayers could become a powerful weapon in the campaign to defeat the ballot measures.
Prentice said the number represents his best guess of how the proposals would boost the base of government spending that is used to calculate future spending growth. He said he relied on the state’s five-year projection and extrapolated from there.
State economist Mike Maurer, however, said he doubted the forecast because it extends too far into the future to be useful. During the past legislative session, Maurer refused to make 25-year forecasts as requested by the opponents of Referendums C and D.
“I don’t do them because they are so unreliable that they are not a good policy tool,” Maurer said.
Until now, the proposal’s critics have focused on the amount of money that would stay in state coffers during those five years, a figure the state puts at $3.7 billion. Most taxpayers on average would lose about $500 in TABOR refunds over those five years, the state says.
But Prentice said at a Capitol news conference, “We’re not looking at the total impact on the citizens of Colorado by just looking at the five-year impact.”
The news conference was called by Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute research organization and leader of the campaign group “Vote No; It’s Your Dough.”
Caldara accused proponents of trying to hide the long-term price tag of their Nov. 1 ballot questions and he challenged state officials to release their own 25-year estimates.
“The Colorado taxpayers deserve to know what the next generation will pay for this tax increase,” he said.
Gov. Bill Owens’ budget director, Henry Sobanet, called Prentice’s conclusion “a stunningly simplistic analysis for a Ph.D. economist.” Owens supports the referendums.
“He’s clearly not offsetting the refunds people will get plus the value of the permanent tax cuts we have done over time,” Sobanet said. “So at a minimum, the analysis doesn’t even approach being responsible.”
Sobanet offered his own analysis of the savings to taxpayers. He estimated that taxpayers will save $177 billion by 2030, thanks to the permanent tax cuts passed in 1999 and 2000 and the past and future TABOR refunds.
But you have to take such a long-term forecast with a “grain of salt,” he said. “It sounds like an economist for hire to me. He’s only showing one side of the equation.”
Caldara said he didn’t pay Prentice for his analysis.
“We don’t have that kind of money,” Caldara said. “Who do you think we are? The Denver Chamber of Commerce? We don’t pay for our economists.”
Denver political analyst Eric Sondermann said the bigger number could help opponents scare voters.
“I suspect that is their intent,” said Sondermann, who is not representing any party in this campaign. “They want to get the numbers so large that they command attention.”
But the opponents run the risk of offering so many numbers that voters go numb. “When you get past a certain size of numbers,” he said, “they just all start sounding like big numbers.”
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
