Cee & Dee

TaBOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) has turned into a Taxpayer Bill of wRongs. In fact, a little history can instruct us on how such a governmental Frankenstein was born.

"In the middle and late 1980s, Colorado experienced an economic downturn, mostly due to the collapse of its energy and construction industries. At this time, a group of citizens started a grassroots tax reform effort for state and local governments. This new surge of citizen-initiated TELs (Tax and Expenditure Limits) began in November 1986 with Amendment 4, which would have required voter approval on all tax increases and required the state to backfill local governments for any state mandated spending increases. The latter initiative was not approved and other comprehensive proposals failed to pass in 1988 and 1990. After some modifications to these proposals, voters approved the TABOR Amendment in 1992."
(House Joint Resolution 03-1033 Study: TABOR, Amendment 23, the Gallagher Amendment, and Other Fiscal Issues, prepared by Legislative Council Staff, Publication No. 518, September 2003)

One of the oddities of the Initiative process in Colorado, is that it amends the Colorado Constitution with a mere majority. Yet, the bar is far higher for an amendment proposed by the legislature, which must approve it with a 2/3 majority in both houses, then, at the next general election for legislators, submit it to the voters for majority approval. Imagine if the US Constitution could be amended by a mere majority vote of the people. How many of the more than 10,000 amendments might have passed? Only 17 since the Bill of Rights have passed the difficult test to become law. What a mess that document would be with thousands of amendments. Yet, that is exactly what the initiative process allows here in our state.

The tax limitation interests brought the issue to vote again and again until it passed in 1992. Now, it is pitched as the "will of the voters" for seeming all eternity. Even C & D, compromises and short-term fixes at best, are viewed as threats to a whole worldview. But that's because the real purpose behind TaBOR wasn't tax limitation, that was just a tool to achieve the aims of crippling state government. And that, it has done quite well. Even level headed Republicans have seen the man behind the curtain:

All of these tax-raising Republicans offer the same basic reasons for their change of heart. "I have done something that is absolutely not part of my fiber," Kempthorne said when he proposed Idaho tax increases in 2003. "But I'm not going to dismantle this state, and I'm not going to jeopardize our bond rating, and I'm not going to reduce my emphasis on education. (Italics are Author's)

Dismantling the state is exactly what the extreme libertarians and conservatives want to achieve. Grover Norquist, extreme if ever there was, once stated, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." And Douglas Bruce is cut from the same cloth. Bruce simply denounces his opponents as "the "usual suspects" of "socialists, communists, collectivists, liberals, politicians, parasites." He calls public schools "government" schools and maintains the government's only function should be law enforcement and highway construction. There you have it.

And to complicate matters further, the real battle in Colorado over C & D is also about a national push for similar TaBOR laws and/or constitutional amendments in numerous states. So, we have a Constitutional Amendment passed by a flawed, weak Initiative process in 1992, pushed by extremists who want to see government out of the business of providing services, promoted by those that want to extend their agenda to other states, slowly dismantling the state and pushing "government" (read a free, public education for all) schools into the hands of profiteers and privatizers.

The Social Darwinists are out for blood, let the strong survive.

Better yet, how about we keep the government for the people and approve C & D. It's only a start to undoing the damage of extremist pied pipers whose ideas consist only of undoing the civic society that others have struggled to build. My students certainly deserve no less from me.