TABOR: Colorado By The Numbers
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Bangor Daily News: Trying to again convince Mainers that the Taxpayer Bill of Rights is the path to prosperity, backers of Question 4 on the Nov. 3 ballot point to Colorado’s success. TABOR, which they argue would limit growth in government spending to increases in population and inflation, has sparked growth in Colorado. The only problem is that people have been heading to Colorado for more than a century. More recently, Colorado’s population has nearly tripled since 1960. Populations of nearby Western mountain states have also grown rapidly. Since 2000, the rate of population growth in Utah, Idaho and Arizona — states without TABOR-like restrictions on government spending — has surpassed Colorado’s.
Since the trend started well before TABOR, Colorado’s growth can’t be attributed to TABOR. In fact, Colorado’s growth and accompanying booming economy made TABOR, which the state adopted in 1992, and its requirements nearly inconsequential for years. When your population is growing by double digits every decade, limiting increases in government spending to population growth is not very restrictive. It is telling that when the Colorado economy and in-migration cooled during the recession of the early 2000s, people began to realize that TABOR wasn’t such a good idea. First, nearly every school district in the state was exempted from TABOR. Then, in 2005, voters agreed to suspend its key provisions aimed at shrinking state spending and returning money to taxpayers. Colorado businesses spent $8 million campaigning to suspend TABOR. Despite numerous efforts, no other state has adopted TABOR-like restrictions.
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