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The problem with Amendment 1, the tax-limitation proposal, is that nobody is sure what effect it will have -- paralysis or prosperity. School districts will be forced to hold expensive special elections just to raise towel fees by 25 cents. Or else Colorado will enter an era of abundance because corporations will hear about our low-cost tax structure and relocate here.
Other ballot proposals present a similar dilemma. Low-stakes gambling will preserve historic mining towns. Or it will mutate them into gaudy travesties. Limiting terms will bring wisdom to the statehouse with a true citizen legislature. Or the seasoned bureaucrats on the legislative staff will operate the naive rookies like a puppet show.
Nobody knows. We need to conduct short-term political experiments, and fortunately, Colorado already has part of the mechanism in place.
That's the Sunset Law, whereby every state commission comes up for legislative review at regular intervals. If the legislature can't find a reason for keeping it, the commission is history.
We could amplify that with the Extended Sunset Amendment. Under it, every item in the Colorado Revised Statutes -- from the constitutional preamble to the last supplement -- would have to be re-affirmed every five years, and each section would have to be considered separately, with no blanket re-authorizations.
The reconsideration would be performed by whoever passed the measure in the first place. If the law came from the legislature, then the legislature must hold hearings and re-pass the law, or else it is automatically void. If the measure resulted from a public vote -- referendum, initiative or constitutional amendment -- then the issue goes before the public again. If it doesn't pass, it's gone.
If the Extended Sunset Amendment were in place, I would gladly vote for slot machines and blackjack in Cripple Creek, Central City and Blackhawk. If the results were horrible, open gambling would vanish in five years. Further, since the gaming would be subject to statewide vote every five years, the operators would have a considerable incentive to keep things on the up and up.
The same holds for tax limitation. In five years, we'd know whether it brought paralysis or prosperity, and could vote accordingly. Ditto for term limitation, although getting a fair verdict there might take 10 or 15 years.
Some might see a drawback in forcing every statute to be reconsidered every five years, since that would lead to true governmental paralysis.
That's not a drawback, though. Our legislators would be
so busy examining old laws that they would have no time to
consider new measures to take our money and limit our
freedom. As the saying goes, an idle mind is the devil's
workshop,
so let's keep them busy with the Extended
Sunset Amendment.
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