November 18, 2009 08:25 PM UTC

Just Keep Cutting the Budget And...Oh, Wait

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• by: Colorado Pols

As The Denver Post reports, the conservative mantra that the government should just cut, cut, cut isn’t actually working out so well for the private industry in Colorado:

Colorado’s ability to increase incomes and create jobs for its citizens is lagging behind surrounding states it must compete with, a report released Tuesday by the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. warns.

“Our findings show that Colorado is not expanding its competitiveness,” the group notes in its report, “Toward a More Competitive Colorado.”

The report recommends reworking tax and spending limitations in the state constitution to free up more funds for higher education and infrastructure. The state also should be seeing a better payoff than it appears to be getting for all the dollars being redirected to K-12 education, said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the MDEDC.

“If you are an intelligence-based economy, it isn’t good to be ranked 47th in higher-education funding,” he said.

Clark said the state in the past has made investments in public projects such as Denver International Airport and the widening of Interstate 25, and that it must avoid complacency now.

The report, done annually since 2005, outlines areas in which the state is slipping:

Colorado has moved from the eighth-highest rate of per-capita personal income to the 13th-highest in the past three years.

The state’s per-capita gross domestic product, a measure of economic output per person, has fallen from eighth to 12th during the same period.

The export dollars the state is generating from the products it ships elsewhere is the fifth-worst in the country.

Even Chuck Berry of the conservative and Republican-leaning Colorado Association of Commerce and Industry (CACI) admits the problem:

Berry said Colorado has lost ground in recent studies that rank the business climate and competitiveness of states, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “Best to Worst State Legal Systems” survey. That report placed Colorado 13th, a drop from previous years…

…”This slippage is noticed by business decisionmakers and site locators with national site-location companies that advise corporate executives on where to locate their facilities,” Berry said in his remarks.

Paging Rep. Steve King: Reality is calling. Business leaders sort of like to set up shop in states that, you know, actually fund stuff like education.

(More commentary from David Thielen)