This turn of phrase is an apt description of the Colorado Legislature during the past year. It is no secret that the state government is awash in money due to the rapid growth of the Colorado economy. Most of the increased revenue is generated by the income tax. Revenue has been increasing much more rapidly than that which is permitted under the TABOR Amendment, and TABOR requires that this surplus revenue be returned to taxpayers.
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Now this would seem to be a straightforward decision for the Legislature. If most of the surplus revenue is generated by the income tax, the surplus revenue should be returned to those taxpayers. Better yet, a cut in the income tax rate from 5% to 4% would eliminate the surplus revenue and leave taxpayers better off.
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The legislature did reduce the income tax by 1/4% last year, but that accounts for less than a third of the total surplus. The remaining surplus has been offset by tax cuts and tax refunds targeted to a wide range of different interest groups.nbsp;
The following lists these bills and the different interest groups who captured the benefits. As you can see, many of the cuts were for the benefit of narrow interest groups:
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Sales tax refund. Exempt farm equipment. Marriage penalty. Exempt coins and precious metals. Exempt food from vending machines. Exempt agricultural compounds. Exempt portions of foreign source income. Interest dividends and capital gains. Elimination of insurance agent filing requirements and claims. Reduce severance taxes. Exempts alternative fuel vehicles. Earned income credit. Tax credit for personal property taxes. Refund sales and use taxes for property used in biotech. Pension exclusion. Credit for conservation easement. Income tax rate cut. Exempt agricultural pesticides. Capital gains. Long term care insurance.
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When surplus money is targeted to special interest groups, the outcome may be a fiscal system that is less efficient and less equitable than that which would have occurred in the absence of surplus revenue, and that certainly appears to be the case in Colorado.nbsp;
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There is a litmus test that can be used to answer this question. Legislators could have designed a direct expenditures program to accomplish the same objective of benefiting special interests as that achieved through these targeted tax refunds and tax cuts. However, voters have consistently turned down proposals to increase taxes or to spend surplus revenue above the TABOR limit. Colorados legislative history also reveals that legislators were frequently unable to muster the votes required to finance direct expenditure programs to benefit these special interest groups.
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Thus Colorados tax and spending limits have had a perverse outcome. The generation of surplus revenues above these limits has enabled politicians to pursue a political agenda that they would not have been able to pursue in the absence of surplus revenues.
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These issues are explored in detail in a new Issue Paper,nbsp; Surplus Expenditures in Colorado, which I wrote for the Independence Institute. (It#39;s available for free at https://i2i.org.)nbsp; That Paper concludes that the accumulation of surplus revenue requires a major overhaul ofnbsp; budgetary reporting and decision making to reflect the impact of tax and spending limits on the budgetary process.nbsp;
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The most important change to make is to stop using tax refunds as indirect subsidies to special interest groups. Instead, tax refunds should be directed to the public as a whole, through permanent cuts in the state income tax rate.
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Dr. Barry Poulson is a Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado, and a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, https://i2i.org.
This article, from the Independence Institute staff, fellows and research network, is offered for your use at no charge. Independence Feature Syndicate articles are published for educational purposes only, and the authors speak for themselves. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an attempt to influence any election or legislative action.
Please send comments to Editorial Coordinator, Independence Institute, 14142 Denver West Pkwy., suite 185, Golden, CO 80401 Phone 303-279-6536 (fax) 303-279-4176 (email)webmaster@i2i.org
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nbsp; Copyright 2000 I2IEarly intervention is the latest fashion in mental health. Its proponents want the power to compel at risk individuals to submit to psychological conditioning. The policy question is whether the mental health community can be safely trusted with such power. Its record is not encouraging. People in law enforcement have long recognized that criminals share certain behavioral characteristics. John Douglas used the assumption that serial killers shared behavioral patterns to develop the FBIs successful serial killer profiling system. The fact that a person has already committed a crime is an important clue to his personality. Profiling tells us something about criminals. It tells us little or nothing about how many people in the general population may fit the profile but not commit crimes. Successful early intervention requires information about the innocent as well as the guilty. Getting this requires tracking a random sample of the population for decades. This is hideously expensive and unimaginably tedious. Researchers generally make do with what they have, usually a bunch of imprecise probabilities wrung from a mass of dodgy data tortured by various statistical techniques. Maddeningly vague profiles are the result. Among the Violence Institute of New Jerseys indicators for identifying potentially violent 13 to 19-year-olds are lack of enjoyment or fun in life, a repeated pattern of not listening to authority figures, feelings [that] shift from very happy to very angry or very sad without an obvious corresponding reason, few friends, and nearly always seems angry and/or feels persecuted.[2] In use, these indicators boil down to some mental health workers opinion about whether a particular individual behaves normally. Such opinions in child abuse cases have cost more than a few people their freedom, their families, and their fortunes. When given great power, mental health workers in the McMartin Case in California, the Edenton Case in North Carolina, the Wee Care Case in New Jersey, the Amirault Case in Boston, and the outrage in Wenatchee, Washington lent their professional credence to fantasti Whitman County Superior Court Judge Wallis Friel was appointed to hold hearings on the conduct of the case against Harold and Idella Everett in Wenatachee. He found that Child Protective Services used therapists and counselors as witness-managers working on behalf of prosecutors. In 1998, four years after the initial charges, the Seattle-Post Intelligencer reported that scores of children remain separated from parents, brothers, sisters and friends. The state has put 17 of the 60 children up for adoption. Numerous children say they were hurt horribly — not by rapists but by state Department of Social and Health Services caseworkers and counselors and therapists hired by DSHS or its Office of Child Protective Services. Their stories are corroborated by clinical reports, CPS episode reports and interviews.[3] The report of the 1991-92 San Diego County Grand Jury details how mental health workers have misused their power and abused the innocent. A wife supporting her husbands denial in a child abuse case risks being labeled as accommodating his denial, judged untrustworthy, and having her children taken from her. A child denying molestation may be diagnosed with child abuse accommodation syndrome and judged unable to remember the experience because he is multi-phasic, dissociative, or in-denial. Thus, in the words of the Grand Jury, all members of the family can deny a false molest allegation and, in each instance, the system uses the denial as evidence of guilt.[4] In the last 25 years the mental health community has collected a fortune in federal matching funds in return for finding child abuse in every nook and cranny of America. Its role in destroying families, blighting lives, and condemning the Wenatchee 28, Grant Snowden, the Souzas, the Amiraults, and dozens of other innocents to undeserved jail terms has not been fully examined.[5]nbsp; Now it now wants additional funding and power to rule on the violent tendencies of American school children. The Soviet government successfully deployed mental health experts against those it judged a threat to the community. U.S. experts want to do the same here, despite the fact that hundreds of lives have already been ruined by uncontrolled power in the hands of people deranged enough to believe that children dont lie, that memories can be repressed but not altered, and that denial proves guilt. Given the state of the art, families will be better protected if such programs are denied official status. Linda Gorman is a Senior Fellow with the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado, https://i2i.org. This article originally appeared in the Colorado Daily (Boulder), for which Linda Gorman is a regular columnist. This article, from the Independence Institute staff, fellows and research network, is offered for your use at no charge. Independence Feature Syndicate articles are published for educational purposes only, and the authors speak for themselves. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an attempt to influence any election or legislative action. ——————————————————————————– [1]Mary Doclar. 19 September 1999. Experts look at gunman in hindsight. The Denver Rocky Mountain News, p. 48A.September, 1998. Copyright 1999 Independence Institute 
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