Billion reasons to distrust Colo. Dems

Four years ago, Colorado voters decided to trust Democrats with complete control of state government - the governor's mansion and large majorities in the legislature. As voters consider their choices for 2010, they might be surprised by how little governing Democrats have trusted voters in those four years.

Since 2007, Gov. Bill Ritter and the Democrat legislature have increased property taxes by more than $160 million a year, raised vehicle license "fees" by $250 million, instituted new hospital patient "fees" that will cost $600 million, and imposed some $180 million in new sales and use taxes.

All told, Ritter and the legislature have managed to increase the cost of taxes and fees by $1.19 billion and, miraculously, not once triggered Colorado's constitutional requirement that taxes can be raised only by a vote of the people.

In 2007, Democrats changed the school finance act to force most school districts to collect more property tax revenues, thereby reducing what the state spends on K-12 education. Previously, even many Democrats acknowledged that such a change must be presented to the voters.

This time, however, Democrats commandeered the political will to pass such a law and constructed a legal argument which, although rejected by a lower court, ultimately prevailed in the Colorado Supreme Court. As a result, Coloradans will pay an extra $160 million for property taxes this year alone - and more than $1 billion over six years.

Thus emboldened, the 2009 legislature smashed another of the Taxpayers Bill of Rights' (TABOR) prohibitions by eliminating the general fund spending limit without a public vote. Although Colorado Revised Statutes specifically referred to this provision as a "limitation" on the general fund, Democrats and their attorneys argued that it was instead an "allocation strategy" and, therefore, not subject to TABOR's prohibition against weakening spending limits without a public vote.

In its ruling on the 2007 property tax hike, the supreme court also signaled lawmakers that other taxes could be raised, under the guise of eliminating tax exemptions, so long as they didn't exceed TABOR revenue limit. To Democrats, suddenly everything that wasn't already taxed was merely "exempted" and a target to be taxed. So in the middle of a recession, they raised taxes on Colorado families and businesses by $180 million over two years.

However, the greatest deception is the onslaught of taxes masquerading as fees. Generally, taxes - which, according to the constitution, can't be raised without voter approval - are collected broadly and can be spent for any purpose. Fees, however, were generally understood to cover the cost of a regulatory function or of administration (e.g., licensing or registration) for which the fee is assessed.

Democrats made no pretense that the largest of their fee increases merely cover administrative expenses. Ritter suggested that the primary criterion necessary for a tax to be considered a fee is a "direct relationship" between the payer of the fee and a government activity funded by the fee.

Under this construction, it seems obvious that a new "fee" on gasoline could be imposed without a public vote so long as revenues are dedicated exclusively to highway construction or repair.

The most egregious fee - a $600 million tax on hospital services - is assessed on "outpatient and inpatient services" and ultimately paid by patients or their insurers, who receive no direct benefit in return. Ironically, Democrats dubbed this legislation, the "Health Care Affordability Act."

Together these two fees when fully implemented are projected to raise a combined $850 million a year. With fees of this magnitude, voters may never again be asked to approve a genuine tax.

Democrat candidate for governor John Hickenlooper recently said, "I think if you put issues before the public, they'll decide if it's a worthwhile investment."

That's not the way Democrats have governed for the past four years. So why should Colorado voters trust Democrats when Democrats clearly don't trust voters?

If Dems prevail, no more voting on taxes

After imposing more than $1 billion a year in tax and fee increases - without once seeking voter approval - liberal Democrats in the Colorado legislature now want voters to permit them to raise taxes without limitation and without ever asking voters again. Can you say, "Oblivious to irony"?

Colorado's constitutional stipulates that taxes cannot be increased without asking the voters. But voters have an annoying habit of saying "no" to big-spending politicians who think their priorities are more important than those of the voters, so in just the past four years Democrats have:

· Increased vehicle licensing taxes by $40-$50 per vehicle per year, plus substantial penalties, and called them "fees" just so they didn't need to ask for voters' permission.

· Increased assorted taxes on Colorado families and businesses by $50 million last year and another $130 million this year, again without ever seeking voters' permission.

· Increased your property taxes by some $150 million this year alone, again without voter approval, calling that scheme the "Colorado Children's Amendment."

Apparently, liberals are betting that voters have a very short memory because, as you may recall, the 2007 Children's Amendment was touted as a "commitment to pre-school programs, full-day kindergarten and local school districts" and as a plan to prevent the State Education Fund from becoming insolvent, according to a press release from Gov. Bill Ritter.

Now, we're told, schools are on the brink of financial catastrophe and, oh by the way, the State Education Fund is broke anyway.

House Concurrent Resolution 1002 asks voters to exempt K-12 education and higher education - which account for 60 percent of state general fund spending - from all constitutional spending limits and from the requirement that tax increases must be approved by the voters.

Because money is fungible, it would eviscerate the last meaningful taxpayer protection in the state constitution.

To be sure, local school districts have had a couple tough budget years. But so has the State of Colorado and so have taxpaying families and businesses.

Despite numerous attempts to shield education from economic reality, the legislature's bag of tricks finally ran out this year along with taxpayers' money. Since voters adopted Amendment 23 ten years ago, in yet another plan to give schools all the money they need, schools have been exempted from the cuts that confronted the rest of the state budget.

Ten years ago, the state spent an average of $5,168 per pupil. In the recently-approved 2010-11 budget, the average is $7,279 - a cumulative increase of 40 percent.

Last year, even after the legislature rescinded $148 per student, schools still received an average increase of more than $200 per student over the previous year.

Despite two recessions in the last decade, per pupil spending has increased each and every year. That doesn't mean that schools haven't experienced increasing costs for health care, for energy and for funding retirement pensions or that the legislature hasn't cut back in other areas. However, these are conditions that businesses and families must manage as well - and they must do so without the power to tax.

Because it seeks to amend the state constitution, HCR 1002 needs a two-thirds majority in both the Colorado House and Senate. It will almost certainly fall short of that goal. However, proponents could put their proposal on the ballot via petition.

Selling it to voters will be an uphill climb, as proponents of Amendment 59 learned in 2008. That proposal, which sought to repeal parts of TABOR and Amendment 23, was far more even-handed, backed by more than $2 million and opposed by less than $50,000. Nonetheless, voters rejected it 54 to 45 percent.

The prospect that voters, whose trust of government is near an alltime low, would reward the tax hikers with even more power to tax is a longshot.

That liberal Democrats are so tone deaf that they are forging ahead anyway demonstrates their abject isolation from the financial hardships facing ordinary Coloradans.

Ritter's 'freeze' more of a slushie

Walk into a typical third grade classroom, and most students can explain what means to "freeze" something. They can explain that when water freezes it becomes ice and is solid. "Little Billie" Ritter may have missed those lessons because, as governor, he regularly demonstrates a poor grasp of elementary science.

Remember in 2007, when Gov. Ritter and Democrats in the state legislature voted to "freeze" property taxes? Now, as most anyone who owns property can tell you, taxes haven't been frozen at all.

Instead, Ritter froze the mill levy portion of your tax bill which had formerly been allowed to decline so that property taxes didn't escalate as rapidly as property values.

And of course Ritter and his Democrat allies did this without even the "courtesy" of a public vote, despite a state constitutional requirement than any tax policy change that increases revenue must be submitted to voters.

The state supreme court's balderdash that collecting more taxes really isn't the same as a tax increase doesn't make the $150 million cost to taxpayers any easier to swallow.

Ritter's recent encounter with linguistic frostbite started last fall when, after months of denying that the state's budget was speeding toward a cliff, he announced a "budget contingency plan" that included, quoting his own press release, "implementing a hiring freeze for the Executive Branch effective Oct. 1."

Now it turns out, this freeze was more of a "slushie."

In January, Denver Post's Jessica Fender reported that despite Ritter's claims that the hiring freeze had saved $12 million, "a review of hundreds of applications for exemptions shows that in three months, Ritter's office approved 326 new hires and promotions - out of 371 requests - that could cost the state more than $12 million."

Now, more than a year after the freeze was proclaimed, KMGH 7News's Arthur Kane and John Ferrugia report that a state personnel database shows 2,300 new state employees hired.

Ritter's chief of staff, Jim Carpenter, says the actual number is 1,454 but concedes, when questioned by Ferrugia, that "during the freeze, the number of employees actually went up."

Analysis of the "database shows that in the three months before the (freeze), the state hired about 1,300 people and in the last three months of the freeze the state hired about 1,100 employees," KMGH reports.

Maybe the governor can blame global warming for turning his hiring slushie into, at most, a cool breeze.

Sen. Al White, a Republican member of the Joint Budget Committee who is quite measured in second-guessing the governor, said that had Ritter's office managed its hiring practices more effectively, "we may not have had to make some of the more dire cuts" necessary to balance the state's budget.

Unfortunately, Ritter and his administration have never been adept at managing the state's money, and no evidence suggests that they have learned from their mistakes.

Ritter has signed three state budgets, each adding at least 1,450 new state employees, despite budget woes. By comparison, Gov. Bill Owens, who also endured some tough budget years, signed two budgets that actually reduced the number of state employees below the previous year's level.

As late as December 2008, Ritter's budget office grossly underestimated the looming budget shortfall, and even now, his administration somehow imagines $783 million more in tax revenues over the next three years, compared to more conservative projections by the legislature's economists.

Ritter refused to throw his political clout behind proposals to build a state budget reserve fund when revenues were strong. But when revenues were already declining, he called for creation of an "unprecedented" new budget reserve.

Given his poor understanding of things physic and fiscal, perhaps the governor's next move will be to institute a spending "freeze." If so, expect spending to instead accelerate even faster.

High court's power grab may backfire

In an audacious power grab, the Colorado Supreme Court recently embraced, by a 4-3 decision, a judicial doctrine that would relegate the other two branches of government — and the voters — to a perfunctory role. The high court's activist majority used Lobato vs. State not only to intrude on the legislature's constitutional authority to determine funding for public schools; it also self-servingly suggested that no policy decision is off-limits to judicial review.

So much for separation of powers, consent of the governed, or checks and balances. In fact, the Lobato ruling leads to the obvious question: "What's left to check or balance the court?"

The majority opinion, written by Justice Michael Bender, represented such a stark — and sometimes disingenuous — departure from established precedent that Justice Nancy Rice, who frequently sides with the activist majority, instead joined two originalist justices in dissent.

A collection of school boards and parents initiated the lawsuit in 2005, contending the legislature should increase K-12 education spending by as much as $500 million a year — as if the state could find $500 million under the couch cushions.

Two lower courts dismissed their claims, finding that the state constitution provides no quantifiable standard — other Amendment 23, which the legislature has thus far implemented — to determine funding sufficiency. Thus, the courts ruled that K-12 spending is a "political question" which the constitution specifically places within the authority of the legislature and beyond the court's purview.

However, the supreme court's majority selectively quoted and distorted the law and its own precedent. Even more significantly, the majority argued that courts can render judgments even when the law is silent, provides no quantifiable standard or confers specific authority to another branch of government.

Bender's decision devotes five pages mostly to quote law school textbooks and journals — which have no force of law — to argue that the "political question doctrine … should be abolished."

Incredibly, Bender — joined by Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey and Justices Alex Martinez and Gregory Hobbs — reasons that failure to hear the plaintiffs' claims would "give the legislative branch unchecked power." Is the majority so infatuated by judicial supremacy as to forget that the legislature is routinely checked by the governor's veto and by citizens' initiatives?

In her dissent, Justice Rice demonstrates that a judge can be liberal in applying the law while still acknowledging that even the courts must be constrained: "Chief Justice Marshall noted that without the restraints imposed by the political question doctrine . . . the other departments would be swallowed up by the judiciary."

Rice — joined by Justices Nathan Coats and Allison Eid — argues that, when the constitution says "the general assembly shall . . . provide for . . . a thorough and uniform system of free public schools," authority is clearly conferred upon the legislature and not the courts.

She also scolds the majority for twice distorting the court's 1982 Lujan ruling on school finance.

Bender asserts that Lujan explicitly established the court's authority to review public school finance. Rice corrects the record to show that the Lujan court said, "[O]ur sole function is to rule on the constitutionality of our state's system" (emphasis added) not "whether a better financing system could be devised."

Rice goes one better in dismantling the majority's argument that "the Lujan court engaged in a rational basis review of whether the state's system violated the 'thorough and uniform' mandate." She retorts: "This is simply untrue – the Lujan court never references any test for 'thorough and uniform,' uses the words 'rational basis,' or posits any standard of review."

In fact, the Lujan court left those determinations to the legislature because it was "unable to find any historical background to glean guidance regarding the intention of the framers."

That's the important distinction between originalist judges — who believe their job is to apply the laws as written and to seek guidance from those who authored them — and activist judges — who believe their job is to twist the law to suit their own political agenda and to consult unelected, unaccountable academics for inspiration.

Ironically, Bender, Mullarkey and Martinez stand for retention in November 2010. Perhaps then voters will exercise their own "checks and balances."

Mark Hillman served as senate majority leader and state treasurer. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com.

Mandate madness on health care

Talk about personal responsibility is cheap. Legislating personal responsibility isn't. Take the movement to require everyone to purchase government-approved health insurance. If at first this seems like a reasonable requirement necessary to reduce cost shifting by those who do not pay their own fare, then step back and think again. The damage caused by such a mandate is far greater than the problem it purports to solve.

Passing a law won't magically make everyone insured any more than laws against speeding cause everyone to drive carefully — and shaving a few MPH off your speed is a much milder behavior modification than involuntarily spending thousands of your hard-earned dollars on government's wish list rather than your own.

Many states, including Colorado, require drivers to have automobile insurance; yet the number of uninsured drivers is estimated at 14 percent nationally and 16 percent in Colorado.

Analyzing the newest health "reform" bill by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the Congressional Budget Office found that its individual purchase mandate would still leave 25 million uninsured — out of some 30 million that CBO says are currently uninsured on any given day.

From a practical standpoint, the requirement to purchase health insurance will start badly and grow even worse. That's because the choice of what kind of insurance to purchase will no longer belong to consumers but to politicians and bureaucrats, relentlessly pressured by lobbyists to add to every conceivable screening or procedure in the nanny-state's wish list to your mandatory policy.

Politicians who resist that pressure and defend your right to choose your own level of coverage will be smeared at election time by dishonest advertisements accusing them of opposing mammograms and maternity care.

Requiring health insurance to pay for preventive screenings is like mandating that auto insurance must pay for oil changes and new tires. Only in health care do we forget that insurance was designed to pay for unforeseen catastrophes, not for predictable events for which we should plan and budget.

These are the types of mandates that turn a practical, affordable policy into an unaffordable one. In Massachusetts, which implemented an individual mandate in 2007, the average family insurance policy now costs $13,788 a year — the most expensive in the nation.

But, true to form, liberals in Congress seem incapable of learning from others' mistakes.

Worse still, the Senate bill's $829 billion cost estimate doesn't attempt to account for the total cost to Americans — only for the cost to government. Factor in the cost to businesses and families of buying government-approved health insurance and the total cost soars to $2 trillion, says Michael Cannon, health policy director at Cato Institute.

If Congress can order us to use our own money to buy goods or services that we might not otherwise purchase, what's to stop it from ordering us to drive hybrid vehicles, install solar panels on our homes, or eat our vegetables?

So let's say someone who still holds to the old-fashioned notion that America is "a free country" decides to spend her own money as she darn well pleases and buys health insurance that doesn't meet government's criteria. Then what?

According to a memo from the Joint Committee on Taxation, such independence would result in a $1,900 income tax penalty from the IRS. Refusal to pay the penalty would subject the taxpayer to a misdemeanor criminal charge carrying a fine of $25,000 and up to one year in jail.

What is so wrong with American health care that justifies this type of authoritarian government? And what does it say about Democrats who would jail those who spend their own money however they choose?

Contrary to President Obama's oft-repeated disinformation, health care spending had nothing to do with the implosion of the financial markets. In fact, the biggest problems in health care and the most expensive problems in government emanate from government health care programs. Medicare, for example, is nearly bankrupt and carries a long-term deficit of $89 trillion.

Only in Washington is it conventional wisdom that the cure for big government's errors is to make them bigger. Mark Hillman served as Colorado senate majority leader and state treasurer. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com.