In the wise words of Peter Tosh, “you can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Analysts from Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee (JBC) staff recently confirmed what we at Independence Institute have been saying since last January: “If all one-time revenue had been spent on one-time activities and the state had otherwise managed to keep spending commitments within available revenue, ongoing General Fund revenue and spending should have come back into alignment between FY 2023-24 and FY 2024-25. It did not.”
However, progressive legislators continue to blame the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) for this year’s revenue shortfall, rather than the Colorado legislature’s own self-inflicted wounds.
Deflecting blame
As a recent Colorado Sun article explained, members of the JBC were “served a slice of humble pie” at their hearing with JBC analyst Amanda Bickel.
Without sounding too much like a broken record, most of the “problems” that progressives point to as driving the state’s ongoing budget challenges are misguided, and this hearing only makes the mound of evidence larger.
However, while the JBC may have received a fiscal reality, some members still appear resistant to changing their tune in light of this confirmation.
For example, vice-chair of the JBC, Sen. Jeff Bridges, even appeared in a social media post just a couple of days later, still blaming TABOR for the budget hole he helped create.
Wrong solutions
Coloradans can reasonably expect the Democrat majority to continue blaming OBBBA, “austerity,” and TABOR, all of which I’ve previously debunked in multiple articles and interviewsbefore their hearing with Ms. Bickel.
This in turn means they will continue to concoct misguided policy solutions, such as passing a progressive tax or raising the TABOR cap by billions to fund Colorado’s schools.
Just as a person with bad spending habits does not suddenly fix all their problems by winning the lottery, a $3.6 billion tax increase from a progressive tax structure would not suddenly fix the legislature’s addiction to overspending, and if anything will only make the problem worse.
Adjusting the state’s TABOR cap to allow more funding to go to public schools neglects the fact that all but one school district in the state have already removed their local spending caps at the ballot box.
It’s highly likely those voters were told previously that removing TABOR limits was supposed to fix fiscal issues that school districts may have had, yet here we are.
Not to mention, student enrollment is rapidly declining.
Voters are not stupid. And while lawmakers may fool some Coloradans some of the time, they can’t fool all Coloradans all the time.
