January 07, 2011 09:16 PM UTC

Putting Your Worst Foot Forward

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Pueblo Chieftain’s Patrick Malone reports, the Republican Study Committee of Colorado (RSCC) teamed up with the Independence Institute yesterday, to offer a vision of the Colorado budget that should make the job of Democrats easier.

Economists from the Independence Institute proposed replacing the Public Employees’ Retirement Association with a defined contribution for new state employees, offering tuition tax credits for students attending private K-12 schools, vouchers as a primary source for college tuition and reducing the Medicaid rolls…

The report also urged a shift in how college funding is distributed. Rather than colleges receiving state funding directly, it recommended that students be given an amount to spend wherever they choose – including private institutions – for a finite amount of time.

University of Colorado economist Barry Poulson, a senior fellow at the Independence Institute, said the change would foster competition between universities to lure students. Similarly, the report recommended tax credits for tuition at private K-12 schools.

Ben DeGrow of the Independence Institute recommended making the credits available primarily for those students who withdrew from public schools to enroll in private ones, and that the credit should be extended to not only families, but also corporations and individuals who fund scholarships to private schools.

The Independence Institute also called for restoring the state’s Medicaid rolls to 2007 levels, before a large surge in enrollment driven by the economic downturn and legislative actions that expanded eligibility.

Part of this is simple: to further reduce funding for public education by funding private schools, at a time when the public schools are already facing cuts of hundreds of millions of dollars, is either a totally unserious proposal, or a proposal deliberately engineered to harm public schools. Either way, it’s the only possible outcome. Only slightly less audacious is the proposal to “restore” the Medicaid rolls to pre-recession levels, which would have the direct effect of cutting off health care to thousands of residents; residents who went on Medicaid both through expanded access, and as a simple consequence of the recession. And what happens if you take those people off of Medicaid and they get sick or injured? They’re still going to go to the emergency room, and those costs are still going to get passed on to everyone else.

And once again, as we’ve said repeatedly in this space, eluding serious discussion is the fact that Colorado’s tax burden, due to constitutional chokeholds on revenue pushed by the same people, remains significantly below the national average.

Why are we talking about these extreme remedies? What created the problem to begin with?

The RSCC and the Independence Institute could be seen as performing a great service to Democrats with these “proposals”–ideas as frightening as any attack ad, which segue directly into a more serious discussion we expect Jon Caldara does not want to have.