Since I care about policies rather than politicians, yesterday’s most important election was a referendum that took place in Colorado.
The big-spending lobbies once again tried to weaken the state’s spending cap, known as TABOR, or the Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
Yet even though Colorado voters lean to the left, they overwhelmingly rejected Proposition HH. Here are the results.
I underlined the most important part of the above description because the anti-TABOR crowd tried to deceive voters by portraying Prop HH as a measure to lower property taxes.
As I wrote last month, “Will Colorado voters be tricked by Proposition HH? Will they be distracted by the shiny bauble of lower property taxes while politicians grab a greater amount of income tax revenue?”
Fortunately, the voters saw through the ruse.
Here’s how Nick Coltrain and Seth Klamann of the Denver Post described the outcome.
Colorado’s wide-ranging Proposition HH, a property tax relief and education-funding measure pressed by the state’s Democratic leaders, went down in defeat Tuesday night as voters were rejecting it by 20 percentage points. More than 60% of voters rejected Proposition HH…voters in all but a handful of counties were on track to reject the major policy proposal put forth by Gov. Jared Polis and legislative Democrats… It was the second time in four years that voters rebuffed an attempt by state Democrats to raise spending limits under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, or TABOR. …Proposition HH marked the latest defeat as Democrats attempted to leverage their trifecta in state government to hold onto more tax money. On the 2019 ballot, they ran Proposition CC, which proposed to retain all taxes collected beyond the TABOR cap, ending refunds, in a bid to shore up the budget. Voters rejected Prop. CC.
If you want to track the history of anti-TABOR initiatives, I wrote about Prop CC in 2019. And I also wrote about an anti-TABOR initiative that failed back in 2013.
If Republicans were smart (don’t laugh), they would push TABOR-style spending caps in other states.
