May 27, 2011 11:31 PM UTC

Would You Take Fiscal Policy Advice From This Guy?

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

“Economic expert” Eric Fruits. (photo via Twitter)

Right wing blogs, followed yesterday by the Colorado Senate Minority press office, are eagerly distributing a new “study” from a purported economic expert named Eric Fruits of Portland, Oregon. This “study,” according to local Republicans anyway, claims a revenue proposal from Sen. Rollie Heath to reset sales and income tax rates to 1999 levels–the rates before Gov. Bill Owens signed cuts of sales taxes to 2.9% from 3.0% and income taxes from 5.0% to 4.63%–would result in the loss of some 119,700 jobs in this state over the next five years. For real, says Mike Kopp!

Today Senate Republican leadership responded to the report issued by the Common Sense Policy Roundtable which confirms that the $3 billion tax increase championed by Boulder Senator Rollie Heath will have a negative impact on job creation in Colorado.

“This study is evidence that over 100,000 jobs could be on the line if Senator Heath’s tax increase passes,” said Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp, R-Littleton. “Elected officials need to do more than just give lip-service on job creation policies. We must actively oppose proposals that we know will damage our economy and prevent economic recovery.”

According to the study, Heath’s $3 billion tax increase proposal would damage Colorado’s economic recovery and cost the state 119,700 jobs in just over 5 years. [Pols emphasis]

Assistant Senator Minority Leader Bill Cadman, R-Colorado Springs, said, “This report validates the concerns business leaders across the state have expressed to us over the year. They cannot continue to create jobs if we burden them with increased taxes. We’re listening to the concerns of the job creators in this state; we invite the Senate Democrats to do the same.”

Hilariously, even Fruits’ forecast appears to be misrepresented–it looks to us like the “job loss” number of “119,700” is fiction based on his own report, and Fruits’ prediction is actually much less than this. We think they produced it from a five-year running cumulative figure on Fruit’s chart, erroneously compounded for each year. If that’s right, this is one of the most embarrassingly wrong press releases from a Colorado elected official…ever? Even without that math failure, here’s an empirical bottom line that reveals this figure to be silly: according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, as of April 2011 there are 221,630 unemployed people in Colorado; with our unemployment rate slowly coming off of multi-decade highs.

So…the Senate GOP expects you to believe that we will increase the number of unemployed in Colorado by more than 50%…by returning to income and sales tax rates…from 1999. And while “economic expert” Fruits’ true prediction is somewhat less than the Senate GOP’s hysterical retelling of it, in both cases a very simple, self-evident question is presented.

Is Colorado’s economy better today than it was in 1999?