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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-03-26

Before You Get Too Excited About the Budget Deal . . .

Colorado Democratic leaders and Governor Owens announced last week that they had reached a compromise on a plan to put to the voters this Fall to adjust TABOR to allow the state to return to pre-recession levels, and so forth. I blogged about this before, including criticizing the Governor for his tone in chiding Rep. Joe Stengel for seemingly withdrawing his support of the plan.

But today, a few new factoids have come to my attention which make me more hesitant in my support of this compromise, and starting to entertain the idea that the Governor may have gotten hoodwinked. And in the process, he may have handed the Governor's mansion to the Dems in 2006.

Some of those factoids:

:the "tax cut" included as part of the plan reduces the rate from the current 4.65% to 4.5% does not kick in until year six of the plan
:this "tax cut" represents about $43 per taxpayer per year
:in the meantime, forgoing the TABOR-induced taxpayer refunds amounts to about $200 per taxpayer per year
:in the last couple weeks, thanks to some accounting "issues," the state has found about $363 million it can use to defray expenses (as an aside, the next time the state "loses" money somewhere, could it shoot a little of it my way?)

In other words, the state isn't in as bad a shape as you've been led to believe, but it still wants to keep your money for the next five years. In exchange, it will give back to you a tiny fraction of your money starting in six years.

This isn't sounding so great any more.
Posted by: Michael / 3/26/2005 01:11:00 AM

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