The national movement to restrict government spending suffered two serious setbacks in 2005. Colorado voters passed a five-year moratorium on TABOR’s refund requirements, and California voters humiliated a weak imitation of TABOR proposed by their governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Colorado vote wasn’t much of a mandate. Only 52 percent of the state’s voters liked the idea of a moratorium, and they rejected a companion measure that would have dictated how the additional revenue must be spent.
But the California vote was more decisive. The vote favoring the limit on state expenditures – determined by a rolling three-year average of state budgets – was only 39 percent.
Tax and spending limits could be experiencing what happened to term limits, another once-popular effort to restrict government powers.
Term limits were approved in 1990 in Oklahoma, California and Colorado, by large margins. Eventually 21 states adopted them. But the movement has lost momentum.
Term limits now have been rescinded in six states, leaving only 15 with restrictions on how long elected officials can serve, reports Jennie Drage Bowser, who tracks ballot issues for the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The term-limits movement is “going in the opposite direction” from what its proponents’ intended, she says.
Colorado has been a pioneer in efforts to curb government powers. Its voters have been quick to embrace weak-government fads, left and right. Whether ballot issues open officeholders’ personal financial records (a lefty notion) or eliminate their unilateral power to tax (the right’s triumph), they’ve had great success at the polls.
TABOR is the U.S. model for fiscal restraints. Government bashers love it. TABOR, an acronym for Taxpayers Bill of Rights, required voter approval of all tax increases – and still does – but also set a strict formula for permissible annual revenue increases. The additional requirement that tax restrictions exceeding that limit be returned to taxpayers has been put on hold for five years.
Colorado had lived with TABOR’s spending limits – along with the measure’s much more popular notion that no tax increase could take effect without voter approval – for more than a decade when the spending-limit movement seemed suddenly to catch fire nationally.
This is not just a small-government movement, it’s a weak-government ideology, and its proponents are undaunted.
“The revolution continues,” insists Jon Caldara, head of the libertarian, free-market Independence Institute. “This is only one battle.” Or two. Many other states have TABOR-like measures under consideration, he said.
That’s true, says Burt Waisanen, an NCSL fiscal analyst. “You hear a lot of talk about it,” Waisanen says. “Every year a handful of states will debate these fiscal limits. But few have passed.”
At least a dozen tax and spending limits are under consideration in 2006. That includes citizen initiatives in Ohio and Oregon, and legislative proposals in such nearby states as Arizona, Kansas, Nevada and Oklahoma.
But Maine is the only state since 2002 to adopt a new law limiting state spending. “It’s premature to say that a wave of new state fiscal limits is sweeping the country,” he concludes.
Caldara says the latest proposals are slightly different. They don’t call themselves TABORs but rather TELs, which stands for Tax and Expenditure Limits. And they eliminate TABOR’s “ratchet effect,” which has the effect of reducing the size of government relative to the rest of the economy.
That’s because other states have learned from Colorado’s mistake, says Brad Young, a former Republican chairman of the legislature’s stingy Joint Budget Committee. He gives talks around the country warning against TABOR’s traps.
It’s rather like the lesson other states have learned from term limits – that they make government less efficient, not more efficient.
“The opposition and the way they described [the problem] turned out to be absolutely correct,” Young says.
Fred Brown, retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
