Propositions LL and MM: There’s Still No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
By Nash Herman and Jake Fogleman Executive Summary In 2022, Proposition FF created Colorado’s Healthy School Meals for All (HSMA) program, offering free school lunches to all students regardless of family income, funded by capping state income tax deductions for households earning over $300,000. The program’s costs far exceeded expectations in its first year, creating […]
Another Special Session on Property Taxes: What Changed?
By Nash Herman In a frenzy to counter proposed Initiatives 50 and 108, Colorado legislators successfully passed new property tax legislation during the August special session. HB24B-1001, the “deal bill,” was created to convince the creators of 50 and 108 to remove the two initiatives from the November ballot. Unsatisfied with the property tax bill […]
2024 Property Tax Reform: The Choices Before Colorado Voters
Executive Summary Coloradans have several options to try to address rising property taxes in 2024. The state legislature passed SB24-233 with bipartisan support at the end of the 2024 legislative session. Voters could choose to keep SB24-233 or eschew the bill for either or both Initiatives 50 and 108. Despite being a better alternative […]
How New 2024 Tax Expenditures Undermine TABOR
Governor Jared Polis has been a consistent advocate for eliminating the state income tax, or at least “buying it down” through the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) surplus. This year, Polis claimed that legislation passed in 2024 did “deliver on that promise” to reduce the income tax rate, but Independence Institute’s research finds that legislation […]
Evaluating Gov. Polis’s Tax Reform Agenda: Tax Expenditures vs. Broad-Based Tax Relief
Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, champions increasing state revenue by eliminating provisions of the tax code that benefit special interests—what state budgeters call “tax expenditures.” Rather than use the new money to grow government or redistribute surplus revenue through tax handouts and Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) refunds, however, the governor argues the state should use […]
Sustainable Colorado Budget to Help Eliminate State Income Taxes
In 1992, Colorado voters adopted the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) to limit the growth in state and local spending. Over the past three decades, however, politicians from both parties and a complicit judicial branch have exempted more and more state spending from the TABOR limit. When voters adopted TABOR, 67% of state spending was […]
Bishop: CO Legislature using TABOR refunds to pay for special interest tax benefits
With the public distracted by gun control, abortion, and other hot-button issues, the Democrat-controlled Colorado legislature is quietly advancing nearly two dozen bills to redistribute your taxpayer refund to special interests. The Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) in Colorado’s Constitution requires the state to refund excess tax revenue back to taxpayers. The state cannot spend this surplus […]
The Tax and Regulate Reality Behind Governor Polis’s Libertarian Image
To what extent is Jared Polis a pro-liberty or libertarian governor? Here we can take “libertarian” broadly to mean support for free markets and personal liberties. There is no precise measure of the “libertarianness” of Polis’s various policies and actions that might yield some overall objective score. Some of his policies and actions are pro-liberty, […]
LISTEN: Governor Polis’ 2022 Budget with Ben Murrey
Governor Jared Polis released his FY2022-23 budget proposal in November 2021. On December 2, Independence Institute’s Fiscal Policy Director Ben Murrey went on KLZ 560 AM in Denver to speak with host Kim Monson and discuss the governor’s budget, the massive expansion in state revenues over the past decade, and the economic outlook for the […]
Addressing the Skills Gap: A Market-Based Approach for Colorado
Colorado has experienced a skilled labor shortage for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the underlying problems in the workforce. The state has a high percentage of workers who are particularly vulnerable to forced closures compared with other states, yet those workers tend to lack the skills necessary to fill more secure, in-demand jobs […]
The Colorado Skills Gap: Underlying Causes
This report identifies and explores possible grounds for, and consequences of, skills gaps in Colorado’s labor market. Imbalances between job openings and job applicants are neither new nor largely unique to Colorado. Every state examined in this report suffers longstanding labor supply/demand imbalances, including gaps between the skill requirements of high-paying jobs and the skills […]
Unequal Opportunities, Unequal Outcomes: The COVID-19 Recession in Colorado
INTRODUCTION By mid-March 2020, it was apparent that a major pandemic was in process. Estimates were that millions upon millions of Americans would die from COVID-19 and that there would be insufficient hospital resources to treat all the expected chronic cases. As a result, almost all states instituted shelter-in-place emergency orders. Given the available information, […]
