TABOR - A Work of Fiendish Genius

Know your enemy, Sun Tzu tells us, and know yourself and you will always prevail. Knowing the evil genius behind the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights (TABOR) is essential to knowing the enemy we fight and our response is essential in defeating them.

The goal of the Right is to shrink government, normally defined as the amount of taxes they pay, no matter what the collateral damage. In conceiving TABOR, they found a way to shrink government on automatic. During good times, growth of government would be limited by the amendment but then, here's where the genius is expressed, when things turned bad, government would shrink and the decrease could never be recovered. Government would shrink automatically, State agencies would fight over funding and the original authors of the law would be forgotten. Enshrined in the State constitution, the law could not be bypassed without a vote. Higher education, transportation, education in general, services, all would shrink by default and on auto-pilot.

The marketing of TABOR speaks to the gut: Government is wasteful. By repeating that meme, the Right was able to make a case for TABOR despite dire predictions as to what it would do to State and local governments. Let's limit government's growth, they said, in such a way they can't simply vote themselves more money. But the first economic downturn guts government, the other side argues. They're just rationalizing, the Right replies, trust us, they're crooked. In the end, the Right won and TABOR became law.

Almost on cue, the economy tanked. State funding for transportation, higher education, services tanked with it so that our roads require billions of dollars in repair, our scholarship funds are non-existent and we're closing drivers' license offices to save money. Everything went as the "crooked" politicians had predicted and will continue to go as long as TABOR is on the books. We were smart enough in the last election to pass Referendum C to allow us to keep the refund checks we'd grown used to for State funding but that law will expire and TABOR will resume its relentless, automatized gutting of our State government.

We continue to fall for the Right's gut message. Politicians are corrupt, they say, resulting in Amendment 41 despite predictions of its effect in the Blue Book. Now children of State employees are ineligible for scholarships because of 41. They continue to flank us by using the gut argument. Politicians waste your money. Politicians are corrupt. Simple sentences, repeated until they're bored into the collective conscience and so self-evident that no cerebral argument can over come them. Those are our enemies and they will try again. Our only defense is the offense, speak to the gut. But being Progressives, it's incumbent on us to speak to the gut from the heart.