The state senator wanted me to know just what we’re up against in Colorado.
“Every civilization that has relied on direct democracy has suffered a bloody end,” exclaimed Colorado Springs Democrat John Morse, “and we do direct democracy in Colorado.”
Maybe I need to brush up on my history, but hasn’t Switzerland over the years been a reasonably pleasant place to live? And yet the Swiss do as much direct democracy as Coloradans.
Then again, it could be that Morse is not the most reliable guide to the past. Earlier this month, again while holding forth on Colorado’s budgetary perils, he declared that “in the late 1400s, very few people believed the Earth was round.”
Actually, almost all educated people of the 15th century knew the Earth was round — or at least in Europe they did. Columbus was anything but the intellectual maverick of schoolhouse legend.
I had called Morse because he is an outspoken member of a committee of lawmakers and other leaders charged with finding long-term fixes for the beleaguered state budget. And it didn’t take him long to home in on the nub of the problem as he sees it. Every other state, Morse says, has four choices when confronting a budget shortfall: raise taxes, borrow, hike fees or “cut valued public services.” Colorado, thanks to its constitution, has only “two of those options.”
What Morse means is that the Colorado legislature has only two options (or 2 1/2, if you properly classify certificates of participation as borrowing). The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights does in fact allow voters to raise taxes — that irksome direct democracy business, of course. But to Morse, “that is the most offensive part of TABOR.”
Offensive or not — and I love that particular check on government ambition — voting on taxes isn’t going away. Most Coloradans still support this grassroots power, as Morse concedes, and even our Supreme Court wouldn’t dare invent a rationale to circumvent it.
That being the case, what will this committee do?
“I hope we get to look at a whole range of things outside TABOR because quite frankly, we need to look at how we run government,” Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway, a Republican, told me. Still another committee member, Sen. Greg Brophy, R-Wray, had another good suggestion: “We need to figure out a workable rainy-day fund that isn’t financed initially by raiding all of the transportation funds.”
You’ll hear a lot in coming months about how we need to eliminate constitutional constraints to effective budgeting — and that’s true to a point. But it’s not TABOR that’s the biggest obstacle, especially since voters eliminated its “ratchet-down effect” in 2005 and the state Supreme Court ruled this year that property tax mill levies could be frozen, and tax exemptions lifted without a popular vote.
No, the biggest threat is easily a provision in Amendment 23 that recklessly puts education funding on automatic pilot; it will wreak budgetary havoc during the next bout of high inflation.
For the time being, a bit of perspective is in order. “Colorado is in a better place than a lot of other states,” state Treasurer Cary Kennedy told The Denver Post editorial board not long ago.
And what characterizes the most conspicuous of those stricken states, such as California? They spend like drunken sailors and rely too heavily on volatile sources of revenue, such as taxes targeting capital gains, corporate income and high-income individuals — you know, the sort of policies that some Democrats would be pushing here, too, in the absence of TABOR.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
