Colorado voters went to the polls yesterday (November 1st) and voted in a 5-year suspension of their “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights” (TABOR), the strictest government spending limitation in the country, thus foregoing $3.7 billion in tax refunds and repudiating, after twelve years, spending-cap legislation championed by Americans for Tax Reform and the National Taxpayers Union, two groups founded by Grover Norquist, the architect of President Bush’s tax cuts, who once boasted that his goal was to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Colorado’s TABOR had also been championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation which had dubbed it “the envy of the nation.” Conservative political commentator George Will only last month called it “spectacularly successful.” Obviously Colorado voters, who voted by a 53% to 47% margin to suspend it, disagreed. So did Republican Governor Bill Owens, a Norquist disciple who helped pass TABOR in 1992, but who joined forces with Democrats to defeat it yesterday. “It means we can join 49 other states recovering from the recession, we can make up some of the cuts,”
said Owens, adding, “I did what I thought was right, and Colorado is going to be the better for it.”
A bitter $ 8 million ad campaign was waged for and against “Referendum C,” as it was called. Conservative groups are not taking their defeat gracefully, fearing that cap-spending legislation pending in other states including California (with strong backing by Governor Schwarznegger), Kansas, Ohio, Maine, Nevada, Arizona and Oklahoma may be facing a similar fate. Anti-Tax forces accused voters of caving in to government pressure and succombing to “tax grabs by politicians afraid to make tough decisions,” calling Owens, once considered conservative presidential timber, “a traitor to his party.”
Denver radio talk show host and conservative columnist, Jon Caldera, who led the fight against Referendum C, apparently not one to be discouraged by the will of the voters, is threatening to take the battle to court. “We lost a small battle,” Caldara said. “This is a war that’s not over.” Caldera claims that Referendum C illegally circumvents the state constitution without amending it. “We’ll analyze it in the light of day,” he said. “The basic idea is that you can’t change the constitution with a statute, and that’s exactly what’s going on with this.”
Colorado has been something of a poster child for The Heritage Foundation, which would love to see the just-shelved TABOR made the law of the land:
…In 1992, Colorado citizens revolted against their free-spending lawmakers by petitioning for a referendum to limit the growth of state government to the inflation rate plus the population growth rate. Voters quickly approved the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR), ushering in a new era of fiscal responsibility and economic growth. Over the next decade, spending was reined in, taxes plummeted, and the Colorado economy became the envy of the nation.
Just as Congress followed the states’ lead on welfare reform in the 1990s, it should follow the states’ lead on spending limits. A federal Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights would succeed where other budget reforms have failed. It would protect taxpayers’ paychecks by forcing lawmakers to live under constraints–just like families, businesses, and state and local governments do…
The current federal spending spree is unsustainable; yet, Congress has rejected recent attempts to bring sanity to the budget process and encourage fiscal responsibility. A federal Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights provides a simple, effective, proven model for spending reform. A TABOR would force lawmakers to live under spending restraints in the same manner that families, businesses, and state and local governments do. It would force lawmakers to set priorities, make trade-offs, and reduce wasteful spending. Colorado has proved that TABOR can restrain spending, reduce taxes, and facilitate economic growth. More than ever, a Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights is needed to protect the family budget from the federal budget.
But Think Progress has called TABOR a “Spectacular Failure:
In 1992, Colorado adopted a state constitutional amendment – dubbed the “Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights” or TABOR – that limits the annual growth of Colorado’s state budget to a strict formula. Annual growth in their budget must be less than the annual growth of population plus inflation.
Conservative groups are pushing for similar limits across the country. Stateline.org reported in March, “The states considering TABOR-like amendments this year are Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee and Wisconsin.”
Yesterday, right-wing columnist George Will opined, “Tabor has been spectacularly successful.” If he means that it has successfully gutted Colorado’s ability to provide basic public services, he’d be right.
Colorado has the nation’s seventh-highest per-capita income. But according to data from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:
- Colorado ranks 47th in K-12 education funding as a share of state income.
- Colorado ranks 50th in the nation in on-time immunization rates.
- The share of low-income individuals enrolled in Medicaid is lower than in all but five other states.
- Colorado has eliminated its affordable housing loans and grants program.
- Due to underfunding, court hearings that are required by statute to occur within two days of a filing routinely take 30 days.
Colorado’s story should be a warning to all those states now considering TABOR amendments.
The situation was summed up rather nicely by Daniel Franklin and A.G. Newmyer III in the May 3, 2005 Washington Monthly:
…No state demonstrates the rise and wobble of the anti-tax movement better than Colorado. In 1992, at the instigation of Douglas Bruce, now a county commissioner in Colorado Springs, Colorado voters passed a referendum known as the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or TABOR which attached an amendment to the state constitution that required any tax increase to be approved by a vote of the people and limits state spending increases to inflation, with adjustments made for population growth. Any amount that the state collects above its spending limit has to be returned as a tax refund, unless the public specifically votes to allow the state to keep the money. So far, no Colorado official has even tried to bring the question to a vote. “It sounds good, so it’s hard to fight politically,” says Brad Young, the former Republican chairman of Colorado’s joint budget committee.
TABOR has completely warped Colorado politics ever since. One of the original supporters was a little-known state representative from Aurora named Bill Owens. Six years later, Owens was elected to be Colorado’s first Republican governor in 24 years. It wasn’t long before national Republicans began to notice. National Review named him “America’s Best Governor” in 2002 and admiringly listed his government-cutting bona fides. Anti-tax advocates began touting TABOR as a national model and Owens as a potential presidential candidate for 2008.
But while Colorado has been terrific for TABOR, TABOR has been a nightmare for Colorado, and for Colorado Republicans in particular. The state budget was fine as long as the state’s economy was growing, and bills could be pushed into the following year. Once things slowed down, retrenchment became a serious business just as health care and education expenses began to shoot upwards. Thanks to TABOR, the state can’t increase its spending on roads and other expenditures it’s been putting off. Now, Gov. Owens himself has proposed a ballot measure to curtail some of the law’s limits.
Business is the chisel driving a crack between moderate Republicans and the anti-tax fanatics. Although there is no group in Washington more loyal to the GOP’s anti-tax doctrine than the Chamber of Commerce, in the states, reality often trumps ideology. “For businesses to be successful, you need roads and you need higher education, both of which have gotten worse under TABOR and will continue to get worse,” says Tom Clark of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, who notes that higher education has shrunk from 25 percent of the state budget in 1995 to about 10 percent today. “I’m a Republican,” Clark says, “but I made the decision not to give any money to the state party.”
…It is a bizarre notion when set against Norquist’s outsized reputation as the preeminent Washington conservative powerbroker. But with Colorado looking shaky for Republicans… Norquist and the anti-tax movement’s threats could carry significantly less sting in the 2006 midterms nationwide…
In Colorado the voters have rejected, at least now, the Norquist tax-cut revolution. Many more tests await.
