February 09, 2010 07:02 PM UTC

"Ink By The Barrel"

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• by: Colorado Pols

We don’t know how smart this really was, from The Spot (a Denver Post property):

Senate Republicans Monday night said they found one industry whose tax break they actually were OK with eliminating: newspapers.

Newspapers are not subject to sales tax, and eliminating the exemption would result in more than $7.3 million in revenue annually to the state. Newsprint and printer’s ink also is exempted, costing the state $3 million a year.

Sen. Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, cited a recent editorial in The Denver Post that supported the removal of some exemptions and credits and opposed others. Cadman said he wanted to make sure industries were equally “sharing the pain,” and he offered an amendment to remove the sales tax exemption on newspapers.

The amendment, though, was not limited to the Post and would have affected any newspaper.

“Here we are targeting little industries across the state,” Cadman said, when “one significant corporation” gets a tax break worth millions…

The Post’s Tim Hoover was nice enough not to mention that his paper’s parent company just filed for bankruptcy, having barely survived an economic downturn that claimed Denver’s other newspaper. Before you even get to the folly of attacking the same media you rely on to get your message out, there’s a pretty big jump from the (un)profitability of the Denver Post as compared to, you know, Coca-Cola. A bit of a value judgment being made as well, which is why we’re talking about a few percent of the billions given away by the state in tax exemptions each year.

And no, as much as Bill Cadman might want Colorado Senate News to be the only source available, the newspapers aren’t on the list just yet.