The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights was sold to Colorado voters in 1992 as a way to limit the growth of state government. It has done that.
Liberal and conservative analysts who have studied TABOR agree: After voters approved the constitutional limit authored by Colorado Springs anti-tax activist Douglas Bruce, state government stopped growing as quickly as it had before. Bruce set the limit with a simple formula: State revenue may only increase from the previous year’s spending by the rate of population growth plus inflation. And only voters can lift the cap.
In a 2003 analysis for the conservative Independence Institute, “A Decade of TABOR,” former Adolph Coors Co. director of economic affairs Fred Holden found that state revenue had more than doubled in the 10 years preceding TABOR’s passage.
In the 10 years after TABOR, the rate of state revenue growth shrunk by about 40 percent, according to his study.
But the change was gradual, Holden said in an interview last week.
“I don’t think you can pinpoint a set of travel expenses or big parties or anything like that” that suddenly disappeared after TABOR, he said. “Public officials, frankly, just started doing a better job doing their job. It imposed some discipline on them and some responsibility, accountability and visibility.”
A similar study released by the liberal Bell Policy Center in 2003, “Ten Years of TABOR,” also noted the slower growth of government achieved by TABOR.
“The conclusion of our study was that TABOR works, to reduce spending,” said Carol Hedges, the author of the Bell study who now works at the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute. “It reduces the amount of revenues. I don’t think anybody really disagrees with that.”
What people do disagree over is whether the spending cap’s impact on state services has been a good thing. On Tuesday, voters will weigh in on Referendums C and D, which ask their permission to temporarily lift the TABOR limit and borrow money to increase investment in services and infrastructure.
Supporters say the ballot questions are proper under TABOR. Opponents call them an assault on TABOR.
To Hedges, TABOR has handicapped investment in education, health care and roads – as TABOR’s critics predicted it would back in 1992, she said.
For example, “they talked a lot at that time about how higher education was going to be dramatically affected, and it has been,” she said. “The predictions were accurate.”
But conservatives credit TABOR with saving government from its own wanton ways.
Bruce said he believes there is still some waste in government – an argument he and others have used against C and D.
“There’s still a lot of waste,” he said. “You’re still going to have it, but there is some incentive now. In other words, if they waste money now, it hurts their bottom line.”
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
