Colorado Gov. Ritter & the Allure of Taxation

It can be argued that raising taxes comes as naturally to Democrats as flight to birds because the evidence for it is no less obvious.  Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, who campaigned as a moderate Democrat with a willingness to learn the virtues of fiscal austerity, has disabused critics and supports alike that he intends to honor that pledge.

The lead editorial in today's Colorado Springs Gazette reviews the governor's ingenious plan to raise taxes by exploiting the state's TABOR law, which is the Taxpayers Bill of Rights.  Among other revolutionary features, the law requires mill levy rate reductions under certain revenue conditions, and Mr. Ritter's plan was to freeze the rates and retain the excess revenues.  Only when glimpsed through the kaleidoscopic lens of liberalism is that not a tax increase, but he and many in his party are making that assertion, miraculously, while keeping a straight face.

Since that initiative foundered, the governor has rekindled his plan by allowing mill levy reductions in some districts and freezing them in others--call it a quasi-freeze.  But, what sensible taxpayers should take away from this unseemly display is that the governor's addiction to tax increases hasn't been cured.

When Referendum C passed by a narrow margin nearly two years ago it was billed as a desperately needed way to fund highways and higher education, without which our quality of life in Colorado would suffer irreparable damage.  Fiscal discipline has never been a hallmark of the modern Democratic sensibility because their primary raison d'etre is to build political coalitions by making the electorate beholden to them.

The predicate of their motivation is a limitless appetite for a robust and ever expanding role for government in our lives, and we must stand in awe of their eloquence when they plead their case, which seems to happen no less frequently than the earth turns on its axis.  What goes largely unnoticed in this unprincipled pageantry is that with each passing year less and less of our world is exempt from the intrusion of government, because the Democrats have mastered the fine art of incrementalism in governance. 

The essence of that practice involves minute but meaningful encroachments and tax increases such that it makes the fiscal pain almost imperceptible while convincing average folks that more government is better.  A key difference between government programs and the marketplace is that the latter quickly discards programs--read businesses--that don't perform, while the former, as President Reagan astutely noted, enjoy eternity on earth.

There is, in truth, no meaningful accountability for government programs because regardless of how poorly they perform they always have a constituency that is worked into a fever by politicians at the first hint that there may even be a reduction in the increase of funding, much less the summary--and probably deserved--demise of the program entirely.

The same argument can be made for Mr. Ritter's plan for these funds, which is our public education system.  That may well be the prototypical definition of "black hole funding" because it's where a nearly endless amount of taxpayer dollars disappear and the only thing we have to show for it is poorly educated students.