The recent Post story, “Lawmakers may take on TABOR”, was the best news I’ve read in well over a decade.
Who in their right mind would construct a fiscal system which (1) requires spending but limits both revenues and appropriations, (2) sucks up most state money for Medicaid, prisons and K-12 schools leaving health programs, transportation and higher education to shrivel, maybe die, and (3) makes it all but impossible to develop a functional reserve for tough economic times?
Well, we did-all of us. We did most of it at the ballot box-passage of the Gallagher amendment (1982), TABOR (1992), Amendment #23 (2000). We did it by voting for the property tax homestead exemption (2000), by locking up most gambling tax revenues for “out-door” programs (1992), by restricting use of new tobacco taxes for health programs (2004).
Our legislature did it in 1990 by limiting annual General Fund appropriation increases to six percent, an enactment which is now cemented in the Constitution thanks to TABOR. Our legislature which, again thanks to TABOR can cut taxes but not enact them, did it in 2001 and 2002 by cutting dozens of taxes when it thought the state was taking in too much money.
In 1990 voters went to the polls to enact term limits. Now we have a General Assembly stripped of not only its fiscal authority, but also its institutional and policy memory, its experienced members, much of its maturity, foresight and decorum.
As a result, what Colorado does not have, is representative government and a legislature populated by a healthy mix of very experienced members, moderately experienced members, and fresh new faces, armed with the authority to enact forward-looking policy. What Colorado does have is an institutional apparatus without the authority to chart a course for the future.
The result? Colorado’s current fiscal policy is a mish-mash of initiated, referred and legislatively enacted measures, put into law at different times and in a variety of differing economic and political circumstances, over a period of two and one-half decades. Each measure may have looked inviting at the time of enactment but collectively they have made a mess, a mess which now threatens the future of the state.
These are difficult economic times, to be sure. Rhetoric about ever more tax cuts sells more easily than does talk about shoring up our state fiscal base and recreating workable fiscal policy. But do we believe Colorado will be better in the future if we dismantle the financial foundation of our colleges and universities and neglect to upgrade and expand our transportation system?
It is beyond dispute that vibrant economic systems demand a solid and well maintained infrastructure, and that a bright future requires succeeding generations of college graduates prepared for productive and adaptive lives in the new global economy, and for enlightened participation in democratic governance. We do not get to a better place by letting what we have fall victim to bad policy, partisan politics and political timidity.
Perhaps Colorado needs a constitutional convention to jettison our dysfunctional fiscal policies. Perhaps a variant of failed 2008 ballot measure Amendment #59 would help get the state back on track. Perhaps an indefinite extension of Referendum “C” would help. And surely burial of the TABOR time bomb would brighten Colorado’s future.
But what will not serve the public interest is a politics focused more on the 2010 election than on the Colorado in which our kids and grandkids may live, a politics designed to advance the careers of the politically ambitious, a politics which panders to an appetite for benefits without costs.
John Straayer has been a professor of political science at Colorado State University since 1967.
This online-only guest commentary has not been edited.
