We regret that fellow Democrats cajoled Boulder’s Rep. Jack Pommer into scrapping a bill that would have closed such a loophole, and possibly netted the state up to $24 million a year by doing so.
Pommer tried to pass legislation to stop the abuse to the state’s Old Age Pension program, but the same lawmakers who agreed to cut several other tax exemptions to Colorado businesses and consumers rebuffed him.
“Every day, I’m made to feel like the guy who wants to throw people out of nursing homes,” the Joint Budget Committee chairman told The Post’s Tim Hoover. “I just got fed up with it.”
Colorado lawmakers had to bridge a $2.2 billion budget hole for the fiscal year that ends June 30, and face an expected $1.3 billion deficit in the next year.
Recently Democrats drew fire for canceling a tax exemption that so angered , the company fired its Colorado associates. That measure was expected to earn the state but $5 million.
Since 1936, the Old Age Pension fund has provided low-income Colorado residents 60 and older with cash benefits, which recently have been up to nearly $700 a month. It also supplements some medical costs.
Legal immigrants are allowed to draw from the pension, and they now consume most of the benefits — or $53 million of the $80 million handed out a year. Pommer’s measure could have saved between $14 million and $24 million a year.
Now that money has to be found elsewhere.
Yes, we want Colorado to help protect and provide for the vulnerable among us, but critics of the pension system say the loophole is being vigorously exploited and that even recently arrived immigrants with families able to support them are signing up for benefits.
Federal law requires the family members who sponsor the elderly immigrants to support them financially. Only after a sponsored immigrant becomes a citizen, has worked for 10 years or has otherwise become selfreliant are family members freed from the obligation.
Colorado law says immigrants don’t have to count the incomes of the sponsoring families when applying for pension funds — thus the loophole.
Pommer tried to close it last year, but the state’s share of the $787 billion in federal stimulus money came with the requirement that Medicaid spending remain at current levels. Because pension recipients also qualify for Medicaid support, Pommer understandably postponed changing the system.
Pommer has called the loophole “outrageous,” and we have shared that assessment, which we now also apply to the General Assembly’s inability to act.
