Politicians spend so much now they are complaining of a "budget shortfall"

The chicken wire holding up the Capitol's gold dome will have to do its job for another five years, as lawmakers grappled with the surprise news Thursday of a $700 million budget shortfall.

http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_8644832

I cannot feel sorry for the politicians.

On this blog over the years we have documented story after story of new projects the government has gotten into, even when it seems they cannot pay for the government programs already in existence. Referendum C was passed to increase revenue to the state only a couple of years ago. We have also documented laws that harm business and hurt tax revenues by proxy, gambling revenues are down since the smoking ban, bar sales are also down (the smoking ban is just one example of several). Every year our prison population grows as more laws are created and broken, costing tax payers somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 per prisoner and nobody in the government seems to be asking if it is worth throwing all of these non-violent prisoners in jail and draining the pockets of the tax payers at the same time. For every person we put in prison it not only costs us to house them, but also we take a person who was probably paying taxes and forcing them out of the system, so how many thousands is it worth to house a recreational drug user in the prison system? We see schools performing worse, even as they continue to get more and more money. Our roads are falling apart, even as the government wants to build trains. 

Comments

[Brian Martinez]

Referendum C was passed to increase revenue to the state only a couple of years ago.

Correction: Ref C only raised the revenue cap imposed by TABOR. In other words, it allows the state to keep more tax money than would be allowed by law. But if tax revenue hasn't gone up (or, in this case, has actually shrunk), then Ref C really has had no effect.

That's why the legislature (and Bill Owens) sold the voters a bill of goods in 2005 when they promoted Ref C; they held it up as some type of panacea for the state's fiscal woes, as if it could magically generate revenue that didn't exist before.

Not that I feel sorry for politicians, either.

[severin]

Brian,
Whether or not it worked as expected, Referendum C was passed to increase revenue to the state.

Ref C did increase the budget for 2006.

"The state collected $300 million more under Referendum C during fiscal year 2006 than the legislature expected when it set the budget last spring.

That brings to $1.116 billion the total taxes that Ref C allowed Colorado to keep for the year that ended in June. It is money that otherwise would have been returned to taxpayers under the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights."

Rocky Mountain News

I understand that even with ref C, if nobody has money, revenues will drop. However that does not change the fact that ref C was supposed to increase revenues and was a tax increase.