The Rocky Mountain News reports today on outgoing House Speaker Andrew Romanoff’s intense efforts to place an initiative on the ballot that would forever end TABOR refunds for Colorado taxpayers. Of course, the skewed way the Rocky describes the ballot measure, you wonder what sensible person could oppose it:
While the rest of Colorado is hiking, rafting, barbecuing or putting in some serious hammock time, Romanoff, D-Denver, and a group of volunteers will hit the streets attempting to gather about 120,000 signatures from registered voters….
The proposal aims to unsnarl the fiscal knot of conflicting spending mandates and limits embedded in the state’s constitution.
Called SAFE (Savings Account for Education), the effort would seek to extend the fiscal relief that voters provided when they approved a 5-year timeout from the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights. That timeout is set to expire in 2010.
Ari Armstrong has a better idea for Romanoff’s SAFE acronym:
The older SAFE stood for Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic. Call this one Statist Alternatives to the Freedom Epidemic.
Armstrong also suggests the tag “Referendum C: Part II,” since Romanoff’s new proposal basically concedes the 2005 multi-billion dollar permanent tax and spending increase just wasn’t quite enough. For the tax-consuming bureaucrats in state government, there is no such thing as enough.
Gutting TABOR, as this measure effectively would do, has been on the Democrat agenda for years. Colorado will be better off if Romanoff’s not-so “SAFE” initiative doesn’t qualify for the ballot.
Someone needs to invite Romanoff to go for a hike or to come over for a barbecue.
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