While the recent fiscal fight in Washington was quite a spectacle, we have our own problems with Colorado’s fiscal state. This year’s legislative session was characterized mainly by budget cuts — with more of the same expected next year — and, even with the hope of an economic recovery, projections from the University of Denver’s tax study show an increasingly constrained budget in years ahead.
Few who examine Colorado’s fiscal processes can be proud of the conflicting voter-approved tax and expenditure rules — TABOR, Gallagher, etc. — that tie the hands of elected officials and have reduced spending on K-12 and higher education, transportation, human services, and criminal justice infrastructures from average state levels 20 years ago, to among the lowest in America.
Some suggest that this must not be a problem, since citizens/taxpayers voted for this state of affairs. But they are wrong.
First, citizens, in Colorado and elsewhere are not well informed about policy details. Large majorities can’t even name their congressional representative (or the vice president), and the typical voter believes the federal budget includes more than 10 percent for foreign aid, when the actual amount is less than 1 percent.
Second, voters are unrealistic. Polls show that citizens want low taxes, but they also want high quality public services. These two things together are not possible, though some citizens believe government wastes huge amounts of money — indeed, some polls show voters believing that 50 percent of tax money is “wasted.” In truth, given the leanness of Colorado’s budget after 20 years of TABOR, there is little real “waste,” since state government mostly writes checks to school districts and to health care providers. Conservative politicians are highly motivated to identify waste, and they have largely failed to do so.
The lack of voter knowledge and an inaccurate notion of widespread waste of tax money leads to a version of direct democracy that supports constraints on policymakers. And, despite the term “democracy,” governing by initiative is largely driven by interest groups with money to spend on campaigns.
But there is a better way, as our founding fathers recognized: Let elected representatives make decisions. They have the job and time to learn details about programs. Citizens, with their understandably limited knowledge, can freely vote for Democrats or Republicans, and expect that these officials will follow their ideological promises. If these officials don’t follow through, citizens can vote them out of office. And Colorado has legislative term limits, even if incumbents manage to keep winning elections.
The voter-approved restrictions on representative government in Colorado have lead 38 legislators or former legislators, including several Republicans, to support a lawsuit that argues that TABOR has turned Colorado into a direct democracy and not a representative form of government, violating the U.S. Constitution.
As a thought experiment, consider a hypothetical ballot initiative, the Citizens Bill of Rights (CIBOR). Under CIBOR, the legislature would not be allowed to cut any programs that affect Colorado citizens without a majority vote of the citizens. Most people would say that is ridiculous; how could the legislature be bound by such constraints? And yet, TABOR pretty much does the same thing on the spending side.
Direct democracy might sound nice in theory, but it has ruined Colorado policymakers’ abilities to deal flexibly with our economic, fiscal and budgetary challenges. Going forward, any constitutional or fiscal fix that we can develop needs to address this reality.
Paul Teske is dean and University of Colorado Distinguished Professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. These views may not reflect the position of the University of Colorado Denver or the University of Colorado system.
