It is official—this year’s legislative attempt to erode the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) is heading to the ballot.
However, despite late changes intended to make it more palatable to voters, Senate Bill 135 is still not an “education funding” bill, as proponents stubbornly claim.
Let’s examine why.
Changes to the bill
Those proponents were actually caught lying not just by watchful citizens, but also by other legislators, and even the state’s Title Board.
The bill’s supporters initially claimed that SB-135 was for education funding, even though only a tiny portion of the measure’s newly retained revenue was actually required to go to education.
The rest would be available for any other purpose.
The Democrat sponsors even rejected attempts by their Republican colleagues to amend the bill to require that all retained revenue go to education.
Eventually, however, they pivoted amidst the scrutiny and changed the bill so that most of the retained revenue must now go to education, but only for the first 10 years.
So why should the bill still not be considered an “education funding” bill?
A decade is not forever
SB-135 does not include a sunset clause, meaning that barring future legislation, the new, higher TABOR revenue limit set by the bill is here to stay—forever.
Meanwhile, the requirement that the newly retained taxpayer money go only to education lasts only for the first 10 years.
After that, all the money becomes available for any other purpose.
In other words, the longer the new TABOR limit remains in place, the less likely the measure could reasonably be considered an “education funding” measure.
For example, even if the new TABOR limit only lasts 50 years, that would mean that the bill titled “State Public K-12 Education Funding” would only have required the money to actually go to education for a fifth of the measure’s life.
Under SB-135, after the initial decade, the money becomes available to spend as lawmakers see fit in perpetuity —the scheme here should be obvious.
Colorado is already struggling with chronic overspending and fraud; it is easy to imagine how much worse it would become if the state government were given free rein to spend billions of dollars that should have stayed in Colorado’s economy.
Of course, the bill’s supporters will continue to claim that most of the money will go to education, and they are relying on voters to look only at the measure in the short term.
Instead, voters must understand the actual consequences of approving the scheme at the ballot box. The long-term consequences are not worth it.
Nash Herman is a fiscal policy analyst at Independence Institute, a free market think tank in Denver
