June 25, 2011 12:17 AM UTC

Fruits On Parade!

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• by: Colorado Pols

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

A few weeks ago, we briefly discussed a “study” from a right-wing thinktank opposed to Initiative 25. To recap, that’s the ballot initiative proposed by Sen. Rollie Heath and supported by a range of fiscal policy and progressive groups, that would revert Colorado sales and income taxes to 1999 levels for five years to raise funds for public education.

The study authored by Oregon conservative economics professor Eric Fruits (photo right) asserts that if sales tax rates were to revert to 1999 levels for five years, it would result in some 30,500 in “reduced employment” by the end of that period in 2017. Due to an apparent simple math error that we freely admit was not made by Dr. Fruits, this 30,500 figure was compounded with the figure for prior years by the local proponents of his study. Including, very amusingly, the Colorado Senate GOP press office, arriving at the wildly spectacular figure of over 119,000 “jobs lost.” Which they have proceeded to trumpet in op-eds around the state.

Now, being a fellow conservative, Dr. Fruits doesn’t want to directly throw the people who paid for his study, or politicians “quoting” it, under the wheels–finally contacted by a Huffington Post writer to confirm or deny this figure, he replies with laughable walking-on-eggshells ambiguity:

If the tax increases remain in effect through 2017, then employment in that year would be 30,500 lower than otherwise. [Pols emphasis] I presented the information in the way I prefer to present it. It is up to the reader to decide whether to focus on the yearly ‘snapshots’ or add up the figures into job-years. Either approach seems to be widely accepted…

“Seems to be widely accepted?” You’ve got to hand it to this guy. After all, that number should probably appear somewhere in his study for it to be “accepted,” right? Why wouldn’t this chart, for example, pointed out by a commenter in the previous thread, count up to 119,000 in “reduced employment” instead of 30,000? Wasn’t the whole point of this thing to scare people?

Fruits didn’t quite revise Paul Revere’s Wikipedia page, which is a reflection of some basic degree of professional integrity for which we applaud him. But seriously, Dr. Fruits, the Senate Minority puts out erroneous nonsense, charitably ignored by local media, all the time. There’s really not much to be gained going out on a limb credibility-wise for them.

And here’s the bottom line: neither of these figures–119,000 “lost jobs,” or 30,000 in “reduced employment,” or whatever big scary number they come up with next–are believable for a host of reasons. The plainest, as we said originally, is the simple implausibility of the idea that 1999’s state sales and income tax rates, going back from 4.63% to 5% and 2.9% to 3% respectively, could result in the loss of over a hundred thousand jobs–an increase in the unemployed of over 50%. Colorado’s economy has never been as healthy as it was in 1999, when these taxes were cut. But more than that–the whole assumption, that your taxes are “too high” at any level is, as we’ve said over and over, fundamentally, irretrievably, we’re-sick-of-arguing-about-it wrong.

At a time when Washington is wrestling with how to end federal budget deficits and trim the national debt – huge questions that are expected to dominate the nation’s politics through the 2012 elections – the fact that Americans are under-taxed compared with U.S. historic norms is central to the discussion.

This fact is separate from the politically charged questions of whether government spends too much, the fairness of who pays how much and what we value or don’t in government spending. It’s simply that our tax burden is low in the long view of U.S. history, and there are many ways to measure that central truth. [Pols emphasis]

Folks, we don’t expect it to become a campaign slogan, but we’ll say it since somebody really needs to: your taxes are not “too high.” They are not “too high” today, and they were not “too high” in 1999 when they were last cut in in the state of Colorado. Just keep this in the back of your mind at all times: any time somebody says that you are paying more taxes, or “too much,” they are lying to you. You are paying lower taxes today, not higher, at almost every level of government–and this is what directly results in our state being continuously forced to make cuts to things like health care and education. Speaking federally, tax cuts are why we have a huge national debt to scare the public into support for budget cuts that otherwise harm their interests.

But above all, nonsense like this “expert” forecast of doom and gloom, however misrepresented, over a return to tax rates under which the state actually was quite prosperous–only 12 years ago–this kind of essential dishonesty is why we can’t have an honest conversation about taxes.