Tom Wiens’ ad attacking Jane Norton for supporting Referendum C may score points with the Republican Party’s right wing in their Senate primary battle — and believe it or not, party caucuses are only two weeks away — but he ought to knock it off. The ad misrepresents both Ref. C and his own record.
The ad claims that Ref. C, which allowed the state to keep five years of surpluses that would otherwise have been refunded under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, is “hurting our economy, costing us jobs and making small businesses suffer.”
Yet, how could that be? The state hasn’t actually collected a TABOR surplus during this recession. In fact, the last time the state kept a surplus because of Ref. C, Colorado unemployment was more than 3 percent lower than it is today.
Equally misleading is the ad’s suggestion that support of Ref. C is akin to backing runaway spending in Washington.
“You know, Democrats (in Washington) aren’t the only hypocrites,” Wiens warns in the ad. “Too many Republicans have forgotten what our party stands for. Right here in Colorado, some Republican leaders backed Referendum C, the biggest tax increase in our state’s history. I opposed it.”
Some Republican leaders, Norton among them, supported Ref. C as a way to let the state make up revenues it had lost during the stalled economy that followed 9/11, when the budget experienced the worst decline in revenue since the Great Depression. TABOR imposed a recession-based spending limit, but Ref. C dispensed with this so-called downward ratchet.
It’s one thing for some voters to believe — as plenty apparently do — that the state is as profligate as the federal government. Wiens, however, is a former state senator who knows better. The spending habits of Colorado and Washington aren’t remotely comparable.
Sure, you can find questionable expenditures in the state budget that add up to significant sums. What you can’t do, however, is eliminate the sort of shortfalls this state faced in 2002 and again beginning last year simply by trimming waste and fat. Conservatives who suggest otherwise, or who regale us with cartoon portraits of Ref. C, might as well announce to independent voters that they aren’t serious about governing.
The year before Ref. C was on the ballot, the Rocky Mountain News (where I was editorial page editor) endorsed Wiens for re-election to the state Senate in part because he “would be a sensible vote on a budget compromise.” Not only had he supported measures allowing the state to keep a portion of future TABOR surpluses, he also indicated he would continue doing so.
And while Wiens may claim that he “never once voted for a tax increase,” it wasn’t conservatives like the former senator who blocked a deal over TABOR in 2004. It was Senate liberals, who hoped to dismantle TABOR’s limits for good.
It’s hard to imagine a better moment to be a fiscal conservative running for Congress. The public is alarmed by the federal spending binge of the past 13 months and the dizzying level of accumulating debt. Republicans can plausibly argue that nothing short of a major political turnover will stop the bleeding.
Meanwhile, Sen. Michael Bennet has hardly distinguished himself as a force for restraint. Oh, he’s talked a good game on occasion about the debt buildup, but you couldn’t prove he cares from his votes.
No wonder Wiens, Norton and Ken Buck, the third GOP candidate, are so eager to take on Bennet. But if Wiens wants to distinguish himself from his rivals, he could tell us what he accomplished in the legislature and highlight his experience in the private sector rather than carp about a centrist referendum. Because while Coloradans may be eager to support a true fiscal conservative, they aren’t about to embrace a clone of Douglas Bruce.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
