TABOR

A friend recently asked for comments on the Colorado "Taxpayer Bill Of Rights", or TABOR amendment. This was passed by voters a few years back, and has been seen by many as a major contributor to a fiscal crisis in Colorado today.

In general, what TABOR does is limit revenue as much as anything else as I understand it, preventing the state from collecting and keeping taxes in flush years, then requiring the state to live within means during lean years. In business, if you have an off year, you hope to make up for it next year with profits to offset the losses, and conversely you invest during flush times in ways that allow you to ride out the lean years that you might run into. You don't sent refunds to your customers during the up years - telling them, "no thanks, we really don't need the money this year." We all do that in our personal budgets too. As I understand it, TABOR really prevents the state from doing this.

The bigger issue to me is how our collective (government) finances are managed. It seems that prior to Reagan, (at least during my adult lifetime), voters elected officials with the expectation that they would manage the affairs and finances of the government responsibly, assuring future solvency for future generations as the foundation, and then we can all argue and bicker over the ways that we spend the money that we put into the pot. Then, starting with Reagan, the focus seemed to shift away from solvency for the future, and we seemed to convince ourselves that if we just shut off the revenue stream, (spelled taxes), that the spending side of the equation would take care of itself. In fact, I remember arguments from Reagan supporting talking heads at the time that said that nearly verbatim.

To me, this seemed nonsense at the time, and I am sorry to say that every evidence points to my being right for a change on this one. The analogy to me is that my wife (or husband, as the case might be), has a spending problem, and keeps running up credit card bills and spending over our means. So, to solve the problem, I go to my boss at work and ask him to cut my salary, so that my wife will quit spending so much… It is not only doomed to failure, it is doomed to throw us into bankruptcy, and I believe that this is exactly what these economic policies of the past 25 years have done to this country – brought us to the brink of bankruptcy.

And by the way, did cutting the revenue stream have any impact on spending? None whatsoever. Reagan, along with both Democratic and Republican congresses, went on a spending binge that is second only to the one that the current Republican administration and Congress are on.

Of course, the American people are complacent in this crime, as we have continued to vote into office people who will promise to cut our taxes – kind of like the employer who continues to hire the folks who promise to ask for less pay. In the end, we are getting what we pay for – irresponsibility. Look at the first Bush, whose broken “read my lips” promise certainly helped him lose the election. While I was no fan of Bush senior, he clearly saw a fiscal crisis, and choose to act with responsibility and courage to enact revenue to solve the fiscal crisis. I applauded him for his courage, but the Dems crucified him over his broken pledge. Why did he feel compelled to utter those fateful “read my lips” words? He was coached that this is what would get him elected – and his coaches were right. Shame on us…

The real issue is spending, not revenue. Any path that addresses only the revenue stream in a negative way is doomed to failure. So long as we are a nation, we should be having constant battles over our spending priorities and where the money goes – this is part of Democracy In Action. The politicians have found a cowards way out by selling us on the notion that revenue fixes, (like TABOR), are what we should be thinking about. What we SHOULD REALLY be thinking about is how the politicians are spending our money. This should be the primary issue in every single election.

But when was the last time that you saw any spending issue debated among candidates? They want to tell you about how much they are cutting your taxes, though the truth is that they are simply deferring your current taxes – with interest – to your children. Who among us even knows how our government budgets are broken down? When we pay a dollar of tax to the federal government, how is it divided up, and does this division reflect what we believe our values to be as a nation? And how about our state government budget?

I would love to see the debate on these issues shift there – maybe I’ll do a little research and put another post up here with some of that information on a historical basis…