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Our legislature faces an unhappy task this year: finding ways to cut spending in the $13 billion state budget. The General Assembly has already cut $850 million to bring this year's budget into balance, and now the legislators are looking at pruning another $900 million from the budget that will go into effect July 1.
As a good citizen, I want to do my part and share in the sacrifice. So I asked myself, what state-operated programs could I go without for the duration of this fiscal emergency?
Since I've never attended a football game in either
Boulder or Fort Collins, and I generally manage to avoid
those boot-licking Coach, tell us what a genius you
are
television programs that often air after the
nightly news, I'm sure I could live without big-time
college football in Colorado.
The state has already felt the need to lay off clerks and janitors, but the savings could come more quickly by laying off football coaches. At CU, Gary Barnett gets $1.2 million a year, and he has nine full-time assistants who each earn about $100,000. So there's $2 million a year, and up in Fort Collins, Sonny Lubick gets $533,000 plus some incentives, and there must be full-time assistants in that program, too.
Plus there are the athletic scholarships, the tutors, the special meals and the training rooms -- the annual savings could run into the tens of millions, and I know of nothing in the state constitution which requires that NCAA Division I football be provided to the citizens of Colorado.
Where else might the state save money? There's the War on Drugs. Exact figures are hard to come by, but millions of dollars must be spent each year on spies, snoops and stings, followed by the costs of prosecution and imprisonment, along with settlements to the victims of wrong-address raids and the like.
There's no evidence that any of this spending has reduced drug usage or made us a safer society, so it's pretty much a waste of money that might be better spent elsewhere.
Granted, if the state came to its senses, John Ashcroft's federal troopers would still be at large in Colorado, and we'd still have Republican representatives and senators who proclaim their belief in state's rights and small government while supporting federal incursions and big government. But at least we'd be cutting state spending, and that's the most pressing need at the moment, isn't it?
We might also look at certain hustles that hurt the state treasury. Our state constitution forbids direct subsidies to private entities. But over the years, the legislature and the lobbyists have found a way around that. Instead of collecting the tax money and then spending it in an accountable way, just find a way not to collect the money in the first place.
For instance, if you or I need a winter coat, we pay sales tax on it. But if you need locomotive parts and you're a billionaire, you're exempt from sales tax.
This came about back when billionaire Phil Anschutz was killing the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad by merging it into the Southern Pacific and then the Union Pacific. He threatened to move a bunch of railroad-shop jobs out of Colorado unless he got a sales-tax exemption, and our legislature gladly bent over for him.
As you might have guessed, the jobs left anyway. The state gave up tax revenue and derived no benefit, with the result that the rest of us pay more to make up for what the state isn't collecting from the favored few.
I knew about that hustle because I followed the railroad merger news closely, and because my state senator at the time, Leadville Republican Ken Chlouber, knew where to find some reports that I wasn't able to lay my hands on.
But doubtless there's a lot more of this sort of legalized state tax evasion going on, and the General Assembly could do a lot worse than to examine, and then publicize, every such subsidy.
Many of these go back to 1986 when the legislature
designated enterprise zones
in various spots
throughout the state, and provided tax credits, and tax
exemptions, for businesses in those areas. It also allowed
local governments to refund sales taxes to these firms.
To its credit, the General Assembly has decreed that these tax credits will be public record if claimed after Aug. 7, 2002. That's a good start -- but somebody in the statehouse should be asking whether we can afford these programs at all when times are tough.
For my part, I'm pretty sure that I can get by without tax breaks for billionaires, the War on Drugs and big-time college football, and perhaps a few other state programs, at least for the duration of this financial crunch.
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