Most notably, about $700 million of the pending surplus is projected to go to low-income Coloradans through an expanded earned-income tax credit and a new “family-affordability” tax credit. That’s hardly fair to the rest of the taxpayers who helped generate that revenue. It’s also unfair to the beneficiaries themselves because they’ll come to rely on it — yet will suddenly find themselves without it in the next economic downturn, when there’s no surplus to fund it.
Now, Colorado’s Common Sense Institute has shed more light on the subject. Its latest report, released last week, tallies the full toll that the package of tax credits could take on Coloradans’ TABOR refunds over the next few years.
Common Sense analyzed 101 bills passed during the 2024 legislative session that, if signed by Gov. Jared Polis, will cut TABOR refunds by a combined $2.8 billion over the next three years. That’s nearly half the $6 billion total in TABOR surpluses projected for those years. Just two of the bills — creating the family-affordability tax credit and expanding the earned-income tax credit — will account for $1.8 billion of the reduction in TABOR refunds over three years.
Fundamentally, all these elaborate and roundabout mechanisms purporting to refund TABOR surpluses serve to further estrange taxpayers from money that’s rightfully theirs. It estranges them, as well, from the constitutional amendment adopted by voters in 1992 — the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, TABOR’s namesake — that made the refunds possible in the first place.
As the Common Sense report puts it, the legislation, “undermines TABOR’s intent by divorcing taxpayers’ contributions to state revenue from the values of refunds they receive and deciding for them how that money should be spent.”
TABOR’s original premise was that the taxpayers know best how to spend their own money. Given the current crop of free-spending, government-growing lawmakers, TABOR’s premise is truer now than ever.
The Gazette Editorial Board
Leave a Reply