Fearmongering
wins a convert
The prospect of a Colorado-style Taxpayers Bill of Rights on
the election ballot is triggering hysteria again
By Steven
Miller
BusinessNevada
In 2002,
when Nevada doctors said an Assembly attempt at
tort-reform legislation contained too many loopholes, Majority
Leader Barbara Buckley called a press conference and lambasted
the bill’s critics as “fearmongers.”
Lately, however, Buckley has decided that
explicit fearmongering—inciting of fear and apprehension—is
precisely what she wants to do.
In a recent interview with Alliance, the
quarterly newsletter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance,
a labor union for Nevada higher ed faculty
members, Buckley told readers they should be “scared to
death” of any effort to place a Taxpayers Bill of Rights on
the 2006 election ballot.
After first acknowledging the record
appropriation of taxpayer dollars that the 2005 Legislature
had bestowed upon the higher ed system, Buckley turned to what
she called “the bigger picture,” where, she said, “university
and community college faculty and anyone else concerned about
higher ed in Nevada should already be worrying about the next
election, in particular, the potential of a TABOR initiative.”
At this point Alliance gave its readers an
incorrect explanation of what Taxpayer Bill of Rights
initiatives, do, asserting that a TABOR initiative “would
require a budget to be based on the previous year’s budget.”
While there are multiple versions of the
Taxpayers Bill of Rights currently being proposed around the
U.S.— a Sept. 12 Denver Post story put the number of states
considering similar spending or revenue restrictions at
24—none of the versions are so simplistic as to merely limit
new budgets to the level of the previous year’s budget.
Even the original version of TABOR—passed by
Colorado voters in 1992—allows annual spending to increase by
the percentage of change in consumer prices plus the
percentage of change in state population. If such a limit had
been applied to Silver State government spending in 1999 when
Gov. Kenny Guinn took office, a recent analysis by the Nevada
Policy Research Institute found, general fund spending eight
years later could still be up as much as 68 percent.
(Currently, as already approved by Nevada lawmakers and Guinn,
general fund spending will have increased by 92.6 percent.)
Buckley told the union newsletter that “in 2002,
as a result of 9/11, Nevada lost one year’s worth of revenue.”
But that’s wrong, according to official figures reported by
the State of Nevada Economic Forum: General fund revenues in
2002 increased over those of 2001 by 1 percent—a slower than
usual expansion of the Nevada economy to be sure, but no loss
of “a year’s worth of revenue.”
Raising the specter of “draconian budget cuts
and a stagnant higher education system,” Buckley said she was
“very worried about what the TABOR initiative will potentially
do to higher ed in Nevada.” She concluded that, “If everyone
in our higher education system isn’t scared to death, they
should be.”
Unfortunately for Buckley’s “fearmongering”
campaign, however, such efforts directed at TABOR usually
fail—no matter how much hysteria or misrepresentation is
brought to bear.
In Colorado in 1992, then-Governor Roy Romer
declared that if voters passed TABOR, one might as well put a
“going out of business” sign on the entrance to Colorado,
because it would lead to an “economic Armageddon.”
It didn’t happen. Rather than turning into an
economic ghost town, Colorado racked up huge economic growth
and jumped far ahead of most other states in measures of
per-person economic productivity. What’s more, TABOR really
did protect Colorado taxpayers. While in the year before TABOR
they paid 10.1 percent of their income in state and local
taxes; by 2003, according to the Tax Foundation in Washington,
D.C., that amount had dropped to 9.3 percent.
Gov. Romer also hysterically attacked TABOR
author Doug Bruce, saying the latter was a “terrorist who
would lob a hang grenade into a schoolyard full of children.”
Bruce then printed up business cards declaring “Terrorist” as
his occupation—drawing laughs at Romer’s expense.
Currently in Colorado, the state political
establishment is once again making an all-out drive to
convince voters they should back away from their Taxpayer Bill
of Rights. A measure on the November ballot asks for a
five-year “holiday” from TABOR restraints. Prospect of that
happening, however, appear to be low. Colorado taxpayers
continue to show strong support for their constitutional
amendment, and multiple polls suggest that the establishment’s
efforts to gain its “holiday” is headed for defeat this
November.
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