You have to give them credit for persistence.
In 2011, Democrats offered Coloradans a $3 billion tax hike (over five years) in the form of Proposition 103. Despite the big-government pickpockets outspending defenders of taxpayers by an estimated 30-1 margin, voters trounced the measure.
Gluttons for punishment, Democrats proposed another “for the children” income tax hike in 2013, this one even bigger: an estimated $950 million in the first year alone. Supporters of Amendment 66 rounded up dozens of celebrities, non-profit organizations and school boards and nearly $10 million to sell their plan to a skeptical public defended yet again by a small, committed group that raised the grand sum of $30,000. Once more, the big spending Goliaths outspent the Davids of limited government, 30-1. And again, the measure lost.
More recently, Gov. John Hickenlooper and Democrats in the state legislature have been crying wolf about the state budget, arguing that without more money — in this case, through a stealth tax hike via a massive end-run around the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights in the guise of “reclassifying the hospital provider fee” — the state would see another $20 million slashed from higher education, along with massive cuts to hospital and road funding.
Indeed, with an unexpected year-end drop in income tax receipts (not fully offset by increasing marijuana taxes), hospital fees were cut and road funding received less than some had hoped, but higher ed was spared. The ability of the Joint Budget Committee to craft this budget belies the annual cries from the left that the government needs more of our money.
As Republican Bill Cadman, president of the state Senate, notes, “A budget that grew by a half-billion dollars while increasing K-12 funding and maintaining increased levels of transportation funding hardly represents a budget crisis.”
To the extent that the state budget is in a squeeze, liberals neglect to mention one of the key drivers, one that will devastate Colorado’s finances in years to come: Hickenlooper’s massive expansion of Medicaid following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Initially, the federal government (which means your friends and relatives across the country) pays for the expansion, but over time the “free money” ratchets down to 90 percent coverage by the pilfered income of taxpayers of other states.
Our 10 percent share may not sound like a lot, but Colorado’s Medicaid enrollment has grown far faster than the state’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) predicted. From the end of the 2012-13 fiscal year to the end of the current fiscal year, HCPF estimates that the number of Coloradans on Medicaid will have increased by 89 percent and that the program will now cover a massive 1.29 million people, nearly one quarter of the state’s population. Colorado’s share of this increase will likely cost taxpayers $100 million annually in the not-too-distant future, and far more in later years.
This despite the best large-scale research (“The Oregon Study”) showing that while “financial strain declined” with Medicaid enrollment, health outcomes in the program were no better than for the uninsured.
And then there is the immorality of the federal government redistributing dollars from more fiscally responsible states to spendthrifts like Hickenlooper who cynically aim to boost support for Democrats by encouraging dependence on government?
Thanks to the shield of TABOR, Colorado is in better financial shape than most states, despite the left’s “sky-is-falling” rhetoric. When it comes to pleading for more of your earnings, one wonders if they’ll ever realize that Coloradans just aren’t buying what they’re selling.
Ross Kaminsky is host of “The Ross Kaminsky Show” weekday mornings on 630 KHOW.
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