I oppose Referendums C and D because together they will cost more than $3,200 per working family of four over five years. To working people struggling to make ends meet in a time of economic uncertainty, those lost TABOR refunds are enough money to meet car payments, rent or an unexpected doctor’s bill for each of the next five years. Can that money really be spent more wisely by government than by Colorado families?
Supporters of C and D claim the sky will fall if these ballot measures fail – bridges will collapse, schools will close, violent felons will be turned loose on the streets. Supporters say passage of C and D, on the other hand, will solve all of Colorado’s problems, pave our streets with gold, and fund every good idea that anyone in Colorado government has ever had.
The fact is that the oversold benefits of C and D are just as misleading as the overblown consequences of their failure. In a Colorado without C and D, there will remain plenty of responsible, untried solutions to our budget challenges that do not require us to abandon TABOR.
One huge opportunity for economizing is simple: Shift K-12 education money from administration and bureaucracy into the classroom. Raising the proportion of our existing K-12 education spending that actually reaches the classroom from 57 percent to 65 percent will shift $400 million into the classroom. Classroom spending is the only spending that can actually do some good for our kids, yet Colorado currently ranks 47th out of 50 states in this measure of educational excellence.
Another way to save the state millions is to reduce Colorado’s public services spending on the more than 300,000 people who today are in our state illegally. Additionally, we can fund essential state services by securitizing Colorado’s share of the tobacco settlement and taking a lump sum payment, as other states have already done, to get what we can out of an asset that is diminishing in value every day.
Add to these steps a serious effort to institute across the board savings and efficiencies in state government, and we will be able to fully fund essential state services like higher education, transportation and public safety.
Supporters of C and D say these ideas won’t work because they do not produce a seven- or 10-year solution. But that time frame is all wrong – we only need to cover the state’s essential budget requirements long enough to reform Amendment 23 and achieve savings in Medicaid, the two components of general fund spending whose growth alone is responsible for squeezing all the remaining discretionary spending in the state budget.
My vision of Colorado recognizes that more government spending is not the only answer. I prefer a Colorado that cares about individual hard work and savings, respects free enterprise and cherishes freedom. By saying no to C and D, Coloradans say yes to a better vision for Colorado.
Marc Holtzman is a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor.
