BackboneAmerica

By Brian Ochsner, baochsner@aol.com

I got a good chuckle from the latest radio ad promoting Referendum C &D. If you believed it, folks at the Claremont Institute, Independence Institute – and others against C & D – are a bunch of out-of-touch, stuffy, publicly-funded elitists. They’re glad to see criminals let out of jail, and let college tuition costs go thru the roof. But in reality, that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

It’s another case of C & D supporters going after the other side’s messengers, because their own side’s message doesn’t make sense. Since 1999, the budget has increased 50%, or about $5 billion. State government isn’t starved for funds by any means. It’s like an overweight couch potato eating 5,000 calories a day, and complaining that he’s undernourished.

Please.

The brie-and-cheese crowd that includes Katy Atkinson, Ken Gordon and Andy Romanoff are the true elitists. It’s the height of arrogance to believe that government bureaucrats can spend your money better than you can.

I trust the farmer in Fort Morgan, or the doctor in Durango to be a better steward of their funds than state government. There’s no “Magical Money Multiplier” that makes government spending better for the economy than the private sector. In fact, the opposite is true.

Economies always perform better when taxes are lower, and people have more of their own money to spend. John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts during his administration actually increased tax revenues! That’s a dirty little secret that Democrats and RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) hope you don’t find out.

Colorado passed Amendment 23, which was supposed to fix the state’s so-called K-12 education ‘crisis.’ It put rate increases on education spending on autopilot steroids, and it still wasn’t enough for the edu-crats and elitists! Taking liberal logic a step further – if increased government spending equals economic prosperity, the Colorado state economy never should have slowed down from 1999 to present! But it did.

Federal and state governments don’t have a magical ability to make things better.

If households and businesses can keep more of their own money, they can increase payrolls at their companies. Spend more at the mall. Eat out another time or two every month. Then the storekeeper or restaurant owner can spend more at the grocery store and other businesses…and so on. Think of it as “viral economics,” or a ripple effect that benefits everyone.

To the pro-C& D supporters: It was a nice try to change the subject with your thinly veiled attack on the Jon & John TABOR tag team, Caldara of Independence and Andrews of Claremont, and in the process spin your job-killing amendments as something good. But as they say down South – “That dog don’t hunt.”