Who Else is Anti-TABOR?

Try Colorado's Republican governor:

Gov. Bill Owens (R) has been crisscrossing the country for years promoting the virtues of this state's strict constitutional limits on government spending. He has repeatedly urged other states to adopt restrictions of their own, based on Colorado's "Taxpayer Bill of Rights" amendment, known here as TABOR.

But this summer, Owens says, he'll be traversing his own mountainous state pushing the opposite message. Midway through his second term, Owens is working to persuade Coloradans to suspend the limits he championed and let the state government spend $3 billion more in tax money than TABOR would allow.

Owens thus becomes another low-tax, limited-government advocate who has found those principles hard to hold onto amid a sluggish economy and a sharply diminished flow of federal money to the states.

In the past two years, Republican governors including Nevada's Kenny Guinn, Idaho's Dirk Kempthorne, Georgia's Sonny Perdue and Ohio's Bob Taft have dumped no-new-taxes pledges to push for major new revenue and increased state spending.

As many of our state legislators have been local elected officials, I have to wonder why so many of them think that their successors can't, apparently, make the kind of hard decisions that they obviously did. It also makes me wonder where the miraculous Republican-scribed biennial budget is that stays in the hypothetical TABOR spending limits. Governor Doyle released his budget back in, what? January? and all the Reps have done since is gripe.

Rich over at BlogTABOR points us to a Green Bay News Chronicle commentary that drives this point home:

The proposed Taxpayer Bill of Rights would take spending decisions out of the hands of government and put it in the hands of voters. Excuse me, but aren't those decisions the reason we have a Legislature? If we're going to make the decisions, who needs them? We could probably save more money by getting rid of 132 legislators than we ever could with a stupid law.

Me, I call TABOR the "stop me before I tax again!" law. It's our legislators admitting they can't do their jobs. Here's a better idea. Anybody who votes for it is admitting they can't do their job. If so ... quit and go do something else.

And this is one of the strongest arguments against TABOR: If we can't currently trust our legislators to make smart decisions--where is that Republican budget again?--then why have legislators in the first place?

But the WaPo article linked above (and, hey, sorry about the required registration) goes on to explain other good reasons to stop TABOR before it starts:

All of these tax-raising Republicans offer the same basic reasons for their change of heart. "I have done something that is absolutely not part of my fiber," Kempthorne said when he proposed Idaho tax increases in 2003. "But I'm not going to dismantle this state, and I'm not going to jeopardize our bond rating, and I'm not going to reduce my emphasis on education." [. . . ]

For Owens, as for his fellow GOP governors, a key reason for the tax increases at home has been tax-cutting in Washington. Facing sharply decreased revenue and record deficits, Bush has targeted transfers to the states as a ripe place to reduce federal spending. In his budget for fiscal 2006, the biggest single reduction is a $60 billion cut in Medicaid funds that help the states provide health care to the poor.

"The federal cuts have been very difficult for states to manage," said economist Bert Waisanen of the National Conference of State Legislatures. "Governors have to run programs like Medicaid, No Child Left Behind, homeland security. But there is less and less money coming from Washington to pay the bills."

Before I go on, let me remind everyone that Wisconsin currently gets back less than 85¢ per dollar we send in to the feds. As I've nothed before, NCLB underfunding alone leaves us $2 million short.

The TABOR constitutional amendment passed by [Colorado] voters in 1992 says that government spending levels must be based on changes in population and inflation. Tax increases at any level of government must be approved by referendum. When tax revenue exceeds the permitted spending level, taxpayers must get a refund the next year; thus the state cannot build up "rainy day funds" in good years.

"The result is the public sector cannot grow at a rate faster than the private sector," Owens wrote in a column for the Wall Street Journal praising TABOR.

During the boom years of the 1990s, with population and personal income soaring, the limits worked well. But the economic downturn and the reduction in federal support during the first Bush term proved disastrous for Colorado's finances. The state put off building roads and maintaining infrastructure. It reduced services and raised fees. Spending on higher education fell so sharply that the president of the University of Colorado declared the flagship state school a "private enterprise."

Me again, interrupting to remind everyone that our University system is world-class and does some of the best biotech research in the known universe. Oh, and to remind you of the absolutely irresponsible spending by Republicans in the legislature and with Tommmy! at the helm during those boom times of the 1990s that left us with multi-billion dollar deficits now . . .

[Colorado] Voters grew increasingly angry and demanded changes from Owens and the Republican-controlled legislature. But GOP leaders refused to act. "So long as I am governor, we will not raise taxes," Owens pledged in 2003.

Last fall, the Democratic Party launched a statewide campaign against the TABOR limits -- and scored a huge victory at the polls. While Bush was easily carrying the state, Democrats took control of the state House and Senate.

"We have a clear mandate," said Rep. Andrew Romanoff, Democratic leader of the state House. "The voters sent us here to do something about the TABOR roadblock."

Owens conceded the point. [. . .] The striking turnabout by a onetime tax cutter has generated rage in some GOP circles. Republican legislators have rapped their governor as a "turncoat" and a "big spender." Owens has fired back. After Rep. Joe Stengel (R) announced his opposition to the proposal, Owens said: "When the next volume of 'Profiles in Courage' is written, there won't be a chapter on Joe Stengel."

While Republicans exchange insults, Colorado's Democratic leaders are exultant.

"Less than three months after they took over the legislature, the Democrats produced a solution and got a Republican governor to go along," said Democratic consultant Terry Snyder of Denver. "That's exactly what the voters put them in office to do."

See? This is how it works. The voters elect responsible people <cough>Democrats</cough> to make the difficult choices and then things get done. (And, I might note, the right half of Wisconsin's blogosphere has been unduly harsh towards Republicans even leaning a little bit toward Doyle's budget--"exchanging insults," indeed!) This push for TABOR is by people who apparently don't trust themselves to make those decisions. Well, maybe it's time they stepped aside for people who can. Hear that, Frank?