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Our legislature went into special session yesterday to determine what to do with the current surplus in the state treasury. They can't keep the money for noble social purposes like subsidizing real-estate developers or rebating taxes to big corporations, on account of the TABOR Amendment.
(TABOR is an acronym for TAxpayers Bill of Rights, a 1992 constitutional amendment which limits government spending. It has no known connection to the namesake of Denver's Tabor Center, Horace Austin Warren Tabor, who was a 19th-century silver baron, senator and bigamist.)
So there's $563 million in surplus revenue to be divvied up this week, and the legislature needs to figure out a fair way to do it. Several formulas have been proposed.
The Republican approach, in general, has been it was
your money in the first place, and so you should get it
back in proportion to what you paid in.
About
two-thirds of the surplus, they say, came from increased
state income-tax collections, and so refunds should be
based on income taxes.
That sounds fair, but the income tax isn't the only tax the state levies.
There's the sales tax, for instance. As a percentage of income, it takes more from the poor than from the rich, since items like stocks, bonds, water rights, legal fees, caviar and real estate are not subject to sales tax, whereas the sales tax is collected on thrift-store clothing and take-out food.
Further, if we're going to base the refund on how much a citizen paid in, what of my fellow nicotine addicts? We pay a lot more in excise taxes than do our sensible and healthy fellow Coloradans, and nobody's offering us a greater rebate.
The Republicans can argue all they want that a tax refund should not be a method of redistributing wealth, and should instead be based on payments to the state treasury. But until they examine every state revenue stream and come up with an appropriate refund amount, then any refund will be precisely that -- wealth redistribution.
So let's try another theory. We often hear that government should be run like a business. Then assume we've got Colorado, Inc., with 3.9 million stockholders. The company had a good year and is declaring a dividend.
In the corporate world, the dividend would be the same for each stockholder; why should government be any different?
But that doesn't seem quite fair, either. For one thing, I need the money more than the people with three new sport-utility vehicles who just refurbished a mansion down the street after moving here last year from California.
The state of Alaska collects substantial oil royalties, and distributes the money to citizens in amounts based on length of residency.
So Colorado could likewise divvy up its surplus -- I've endured this state government for all 47 of my years, and any reasonable person would agree that I deserve more than people who have managed to survive only two or three General Assembly sessions, no matter how much they pay in taxes.
But in a state suffering from the strains of population growth, is it good social policy to encourage people to stay? Especially when we're often talking about cranks who complain about traffic, increased water rates, crowded trails and campgrounds, etc.
There's a good case to be made that the sooner Colorado gets rid of long-time residents who remember what it used to be like, then the fewer grouches there will be to oppose the blessings of higher taxes, more congestion, expanded police budgets and stricter regulations.
As long as we're talking about tax refunds and social policy, though, maybe we should use the refund to reward good citizenship.
For instance, those who bothered to vote get bigger refunds than those who didn't, and those who served as election judges would get the largest checks.
We could extend that to jury duty -- everybody who sat on a jury during the past year gets a piece of the surplus, an unanticipated reward, like winning a lottery, for their service.
Or, the legislature might move past the routines of
civil administration and reward those who donate time to
make Colorado a better place, perhaps by dividing the $563
million among those who donned orange vests and served on
one of those adopt a highway
roadside cleaning
projects.
Similar possibilities abound -- classroom volunteers, friends of libraries, all manner of Coloradans who enrich our communities by contributing their time and energy -- and it would be refreshing if the legislature expressed our appreciation with something more negotiable than a plaque.
But I'm not holding my breath.
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