Bowling Alone

Putnam’s ‘social capital’ key to connecting across Colorado’s political divide

Ari Armstrong May 6, 2025

Put your phone down and talk with people, including people with different backgrounds and ideas.

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If you’re a fan of limited government, Tuesday’s election results were a downer.

By Jon Caldara

If you’re a fan of limited government, personal liberty, or educational choice, Tuesday night’s election results were a downer, just another one in a long line of depressing elections that has made Colorado more California than California.

However, if you prefer a controlling elite deciding your fate, debt, class envy and teacher unions, it was just another victory in a decade’s long win streak.

I’m curious how multi-billionaire nannyist Michael Bloomberg felt about his out-of-state investment. He put $5 million toward convincing Denver voters adults must stop buying Swisher Sweets cigars (which contains flavored tobacco, the new fentanyl).

As adults drive by marijuana shops selling flavored edibles, liquor stores selling peach-infused vodka, and legal psychedelic mushroom operations, it’s adults buying smoking cessation products like Zyn in Denver that Michael Bloomberg knows is the scourge of our nation.

It didn’t matter it is already illegal for anyone under 21 years old to buy any tobacco or nicotine products, flavored or not. Bloomberg’s millions convinced voters this was a ban on children buying the stuff. He won handedly as he spent nearly $52 per “yes” vote to make it happen.

Fifty-two bucks a person was enough to convince Denverites who scream “my body, my choice!” when it comes to abortion that government needs to stay out of your uterus but shove itself down your adult lungs. He can’t run New York anymore, so he regulates Denver.

His $5 million was the most spent on any ballot issue or candidate in Colorado this year. For perspective, the class-baiting tax increase on rich people to buy free lunches for just slightly less rich people’s kids raised only $800,000. And that was a statewide question not a tiny one like Denver’s cigar ban.

Passing Propositions LL and MM, the double-down on free lunches in Colorado, was certainly no shock. But it gives us some things to speculate.

It did not surprise me MM passed. What did surprise me was it passed by a larger majority than the original tax proposal, Prop FF, just a couple years ago.

By contrast voters seem to have learned their lesson on the wolf reintroduction fiasco. If put on the ballot today, “wolves” would certainly lose. I think witnessing the debacle of flinging apex predators throughout Colorado is what drove Denver voters to recently reject the slaughterhouse ban and a ban on selling furs. They realized that maybe in some areas, government doesn’t know what it’s doing.

In the same way, the farce that is the free lunch program should’ve caused more of us to reconsider the blatant socialism of stealing from those who have more than you.

It took no time for the current free lunch program to run into the red. I mean, go figure, you offer people free stuff, and they line up to take it. The program also failed to source food locally as promised in the original Prop FF. In other words, the state really FFed the whole socialistic experiment.

Yet even after witnessing this failure, a larger percentage of people voted for MM than the original FF. More of us want to penalize successful people to empower government elite to decide what their own kids should eat.

Could this be a leading indicator the socialist value structure of “take from thy neighbor” has taken root here? Props FF and this year’s LL and MM might be the gateway drug for the cocaine of “democratic socialism.” The first one is always free. “Yo, here’s a sandwich for your kid, you know, on the house.” Before you know it, we’re replacing our successful flat income tax rate with a punitive, progressive income tax.

New York’s socialist mayor-elect spelled it out in his victory speech. “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”

Translation: Here in Colorado we will destroy our economy to save the Earth from climate change (while China builds a dirty coal plant every day), punish the productive, risk-taking class and chase them out of the state (see New York in California) as we micromanage every aspect of your life (like outlawing Swisher Sweet cigars, and feeding your children the meals of our choosing).

Is this the Colorado we’ll buy when some out-of-state billionaire sells it to us?

If you’re a fan of limited government, Tuesday’s election results were a downer.

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Bowling Alone

Putnam’s ‘social capital’ key to connecting across Colorado’s political divide

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