State Sen. Rollie Heath wants to raise taxes to plug the $200 million-plus hole in Colorado’s education budget.
Good for him. It takes courage to push a tax hike in unpredictable economic times.
It takes an even rarer quality — leadership — to propose a plan that involves pain and deferred gratification.
At a news conference last month, Heath launched a November ballot initiative that would raise the state sales and use tax to 3 percent, up slightly from its current 2.93 percent. Initiative 25 also would raise individual and corporate taxes from their current 4.63 percent to 5 percent.
Like 2005’s successful Referendum C, the revenue-raising plan would remain in place for just five years, bringing in an estimated $3 billion to education coffers.
Heath says Colorado’s education system is falling behind other states and countries, and he’s right to be alarmed. “Doing nothing in the face of these horrible budget cuts is just not an option. I expect the state to give a child a competitive education, and we’re not doing that,” Heath told the Colorado Statesman in March.
Under Heath’s proposal, a family with a yearly income of $55,700 would pay an estimated additional $163 in taxes.
Republicans were quick to lob grenades. Mike Kopp, Senate majority leader, described the plan as “tone deaf to the concerns of families and businesses across the state.”
State Treasurer Walker Stapleton called it a “bad idea” and then, in a bizarre line of reasoning, accused Heath of timing his news conference to minimize its impact.
Heath thinks parents and grandparents will prove Stapleton wrong. “This is going to be, I would hope, the greatest grassroots effort that this state has seen,” Heath said.
Tax hikes are vile-tasting medicine. But they also cure ailing patients. And if you don’t think Colorado schoolchildren and college students are ailing patients, consider that academically, our K-12 schools are running middle of the pack at best, receiving a grade of “C” in the 2009 Education Week’s Quality Counts 50-state report card, with grades of “F” in spending, “C-” in K-12 achievement, and “D-” in college readiness.
The kids who do go on to public universities in Colorado will need to prepare for sticker shock: Students’ share of tuition for college has doubled since 2001, and student fees have skyrocketed.
That’s because Colorado cheaps out in the tax department.
“Colorado, one of the nation’s wealthiest states, is among the lowest-spending states in a number of core service areas, including K-12 and higher education, health care, and transportation,” according to a February report on Colorado’s Fiscal Future by the Buechner Institute for Governance at the University of Colorado Denver.
In the past 30 years, Coloradans’ tax burden has fallen significantly below the national average. Colorado levies every major tax, “but the rate on each is among the lowest in the country,” according to the Tax Foundation.
Heath’s tax-hike proposal acknowledges a fundamental principal that many Coloradans refuse to accept: You don’t get Nordstrom quality at Family Dollar prices.
You also don’t attract new businesses — boosting tax revenues and lowering Colorado’s persistently high unemployment — by offering second-class public education.
Should voters pass Initiative 25, tax rates would actually go back up to where they were in 1999, when times were good and Colorado had enough surplus under TABOR to give taxpayers an average $267 refund. That’s when the legislature cut income and sales taxes to their current levels, resulting in $4.8 billion less in total state revenue since 1999, with $519.5 million lost in 2009-10, according to the Statesman.
Where are our priorities, Colorado?
Freelance columnist Mary Winter (mwinte@aol.com) of Denver appears on the op-ed page twice a month.
