November 17, 2009 08:05 PM UTC

Colorado's Fiscal Crisis Barely Avoids "Top Ten" Ranking

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• by: Colorado Pols

A report last week from the Pew Center for the States listed the “top ten states” suffering from crippling budgetary shortfalls during the current recession–there was a local AP wire story that went around soon after titled “Colorado’s budget problem not top-10 worst.” Conservatives pounced on the report as a validation of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), the theory being that years of artificial restrictions on public-sector growth have made our current budget problems “less severe.”

Maybe should have crowed a bit less, the Grand Junction Sentinel reports:

Colorado isn’t in the top 10 states in “fiscal peril,” according to a new report from Pew Center on the States.

It’s number 11.

Along with Georgia and Kentucky, the Pew Center found that Colorado is worse off than 37 other states when it comes to money woes. Although the state has the 17th lowest unemployment rate change from a year ago and ties with Oregon and Louisiana for the 22nd lowest foreclosure rate in the United States, the Pew report pointed to Colorado tax policy as an obstacle to climbing out of its budget hole. [Pols emphasis]

Namely, the report, titled “Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril,” looked at the increased difficulty a state has finding revenue when, like Colorado, it requires a super majority or vote of the people to increase taxes.

“Finance experts generally agree that this institutional arrangement significantly reduces taxes or constrains a state’s ability to generate greater revenue by increasing taxes,” the report states…

Rep. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, said he expects some may want to make tax increases easier to come by in the 2010 session. King is more interested in cutting government expenses and duties than cutting the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, better known as TABOR…

“In my experience in government and public service, government will grow to its size of containment,” he said. “If it is not contained, it will grow exponentially.”

Losing the TABOR requirement that the state leave 6 percent of revenue in reserve was a step in the wrong direction this year, said Rep. Laura Bradford, R-Collbran.

“That and TABOR helped keep us out of the top 10” in the Pew ranking, Bradford said.

Because coming in 11th on this dubious list is, you know, so much better. And to start the cutting, as we have, from already near-bottom rankings in public sector spending–thanks to TABOR? Rep. King’s bluster about ‘exponential growth’ is mindless fiction–denial, folks, plain and simple.