My mail-in ballot sits in an in-basket, and someday soon I will fill it out and walk it up to the courthouse. The post office is closer, but I feel better handing it to someone in the county clerk’s office.
And I’ve got to figure out how to vote on Referendum C. Giving the state government more money than it would otherwise get almost certainly means more subsidies for big companies, all under the guise of “economic development,” and I have trouble supporting that when I’m not a stockholder in one of those favored enterprises.
The state also keeps wasting money on the War on Drugs, as well as on boondoggles like “Project Beanpole,” which was supposed to link schools and county seats with high-speed data lines – and to date, I haven’t heard of any data flowing through those expensive fiberoptic cables.
And, let’s face it. Whether Referendum C is technically a “tax increase” or not, it has the same effect as one. If it passes, the state will not refund money it otherwise would have. We have less money, the state government has more.
But the opponents of Referendum C are sure working hard at persuading us to support it.
What a bunch. Let’s start with Grover Norquist of Washington, D.C., head of an outfit called Americans for Tax Reform. He opposes Referendum C. He has offered to debate the issue with our governor, Bill Owens – in Washington.
Norquist apparently thinks Coloradans should heed him even though he doesn’t think we’re worth the trouble to visit. And what business is it of his whether it passes or doesn’t? He doesn’t have to live with the consequences either way. We do.
At least Dick Armey, former Texas U.S. representative and House majority leader, twice bothered to pack his carpetbag and venture from his Washington lobbying office to tell us to vote against it. But again, he doesn’t have to live with the consequences.
Then there’s Doug Bruce, author of the TABOR amendment. It has a provision allowing for just this kind of election. Bruce is against Referendum C. Last summer, I asked him whether the expansion of a water conservancy district, which would raise property taxes in the affected area, would require a TABOR election. He couldn’t give me a straight answer to something that he of all people should know, so it’s hard to believe he knows what he’s talking about.
John Andrews, former state senator now running the Colorado branch of a California think-tank, has been complaining about “credit-card government.” It would be easier to take him seriously if he addressed some of those complaints toward the borrow-and-spend Republican regime in Washington. But in the gospel of this John, fiscal irresponsibility is fine as long as it comes from the GOP.
In on television, Marc Holtzman stands there talking in “issue ads” opposing Referendum C. And we’re supposed to believe that he’s doing this out of a sense of public duty, not because he’s trying to increase his name recognition for when he runs for governor next year?
Another anti-C ad has citizens grumping about “the politicians” in our statehouse and how they can’t be trusted with more money. Is Owens really a wastrel and spendthrift? He’s one of them. And aren’t these evil “politicians” the people we elect to do the public’s business?
Perhaps the worst of the anti-C ads tries to make this into a “family values” issue, implying that families would be better off without state government. I don’t know about their families, but I know that we couldn’t afford private tutors for our children, so we had to send them to public schools that get state money. Private colleges were out of the question, too, so they went to state schools – the institutions John Andrews wants to close.
We’ve never been able to purchase our own estate with miles of hiking trails, so often we visit a nearby state park. Nor can we afford to purchase every book or magazine we need or want, so we rely on the public library, which gets some state funds. We can’t afford to send out our own thugs when we’ve been wronged, so we rely on state courts for justice. We can’t afford our own airplane, so we rely on state highways.
In other words, if you’re stinking rich, your family probably doesn’t need our state government. But the rest of us do, and the anti-C crowd doesn’t seem to get that. If the “family values” canard is the best argument they can come up with against Referendum C, then I’m voting for it.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
