Background:
Colorado has a unique law known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR). This does several things. The main points are (1), the government must ask permission from the voters to raise taxes; (2), the government is limited in how much it can spend each year. The limit is raised each year based on the combination of inflation and population growth. However, when revenue drops (as in a recession), that lower amount becomes the basis for calculating the permissible revenue growth in the next year. (3) If government revenue exceeds that cap, the government must either simply refund the excess to the people, or must ask permission to keep it.
Now, this law does contain a provision that allows a government to ask permission to opt out of the revenue cap portion. But unless that happens, the law applies to all governments in Colorado.
How many people would like to live under this system, or one that is largely similar?
I would be interested in whether there is a significant difference of opinion between American and non-American Dopers.
Everybody wants stuff, but nobody wants to pay for it. There is an expression about the stupidity of people in large groups, but I don’t remember it.
Sometimes shit happens and we need to have money in order to do stuff about it (financial crisis, disaster recovery, other stuff we may not have planned for). If we had to wait for an election to get it, we could be in much worse shape.
We elect people to handle this for us. We have to trust them to do it and hold them accountable.
For me, these citizen-driven initiatives are an admission the elected democratic system is broken, so let’s just add an uninformed band-aid on the oozing wound, rather than repair it correctly.
Any time you tie the government’s hands you will regret it. There are times when taxes must be raised, and CA went through some rough times when they forced themselves to have a super-dee-duper majority in order to raise any tax.
It’s been said before, but bears repeating. Managing a government budget is not the same as managing a household budget, or even managing a business. Allowing people whose job is to run a government to make the financial decisions (even if you don’t always agree with them) is preferable to letting people who have no idea what they are doing make these decisions.
I agree that very often people want stuff, but nobody wants to pay for it. But we already have a situation where every one of the 50 states has to run a balanced budget each year. In many respects, TABOR is simply an extension of that principle. TABOR is actually an antidote to irresponsible spending. If a community wants something bad enough, the people will vote to tax themselves to pay for it.
As for emergencies–that’s what reserve funds are for.
Actually, TABOR tends to create a very-much informed electorate. When a governmental body in Colorado wants to retain surplus funds, or raise taxes, they put out a list of what the money will be used for. Whenever I vote to allow certain spending, I know EXACTLY how that money is going to be spent.
I used to live in New York State. I remember one year, one of the tricks used to balance the budget was for the state government to sell the Cross Westchester Expressway to the State Thruway Authority. This Op-Ed piece describes other accounting tricks used by states to balance budgets.
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If a community wants something bad enough, the people will vote to tax themselves to pay for it.
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In my experience the people will scream that the government is already taxing too much, anyway and why don’t they get rid of food stamps, or Medicaid, or music and art classes in schools, or those projects on the other side of the state where the people are screaming at their elected representatives to cut the projects on THIS side of the state.
Not just that, most people are grossly misinformed about government spending. If you ask them, people think we spend tons of money on welfare for other countries. They have no idea that the average person takes 3x more out of medicare than they put in. Most people have no idea what % of income goes to taxes at various income brackets. They don’t know much of anything about taxes or what they pay for.
Angry, misinformed people who want something for nothing is not going to result in good governance.
It’s just a law. They’ll amend their constitution again if it becomes inconvenient. It’s part of the checks and balances government needs. It might not be the best designed means of checking and balancing government, but it’s just a state government, and a lack of checks and balances on government is usually worse than too many.
Not very often at first, but then the politicians learned that they had to be very specific.
Here in the Colorado Springs region, about 10 years ago we passed a special sales tax to help fund trails, open space, and parks. Then a few years later, we combined with the county and several small towns to pass a regional transportation authority. A couple years ago, we passed another tax dedicated to the Sheriff’s office.
I know that some of the school districts have gotten measures passed to pay for one thing or another. And quite a few other towns have voted for various taxes, as well.
I find the poll results so far interesting. As I suspected, there is a considerable difference between Americans and other people on this issue.
That. People always think there are ways to cut corners and to lower their taxes that won’t affect them but rather a variety of supposed leeches (the poor, the rich, the civil servants, etc…), and that the state is wasting their tax money left and right on pointless items.
It turns out that in Colorado, at least, the only way that the voters are going to approve a tax increase or extra spending is if the government takes pains to tell people very clearly and very specifically what that money will be used for.
Here’s an actual example, from when that transportation authority was approved. This is the sample ballot from that year that is mailed to every household before an election. The politicians did not simply claim that the money would be used a certain way. Rather, how the money would be spent was written into the actual text of the ballot measure.
It passed, because – and only because – we knew EXACTLY how our money would be spent.