Colorado nixes higher taxes: What’s it mean?
He said:
‘For the children’ no more—at long last
She said:
Don’t blame the kids; it was just bad timing
Maybe it all started with that early-‘90s bumper sticker exhorting motorists to “Never hurt a child.” As if that were the first peril that should come to mind when piloting 4,000-plus pounds of steel at highway speeds through metro-Denver traffic.
Even if that particular message was directed at preventing child abuse—itself, a valid concern—the naggingly precious tone seemed to usher in a wave of public-policy advocacy aimed at putting kids first. Above everything. All the time. No matter what. On any issue from soup to nuts, from school-lunch subsidies to gun control, the outcome had to be “for the children.” It no longer was enough to slow down in school zones; we had to make sure that even passing vehicles were drug-free, tobacco-free, hate-free, you name it. Even foreign policy. War? It “hurts children and other living things.” (Remember that one?)
It was as if somewhere along the line, as we evolved away from kids being seen and not heard, we overcorrected—and fell off the beam. Kids became the tail that wagged the dog. Everything was about kids. Too bad if yours were grown and gone or if you hadn’t had any in the first place; you still were obligated to help raise everyone else’s. Because, of course, it takes a village to…
Until last night.
Colorado voters flogged—make that pulverized—an attempt to raise the state’s sales and income taxes. And they meted out summary execution to a host of local school ballot issues seeking tax hikes around the state.
Proposition 103 in particular—the only statewide tax hike proposed anywhere in the country this fall—represented a textbook case of political tone-deafness and richly deserved the 2-to-1 thrashing it received at the polls. On the heels of what is now widely regarded as the Great Recession—and amid continued, sky-high unemployment throughout most of Colorado—voters were being told to pony up for, yet again, the kids. Yup, from kindergarten through college, they all needed another bailout. Well, not the kids per se but rather the brick-and-mortar institutions whose job it is to educate them.
But let’s be clear about this: Proposition 103’s humiliating defeat wasn’t about the recession; the fact that a whole lot more voters were unemployed compared with the last election was just salt in the wounds. No, the real rub was this: Once again, a handful of moneyed fat cats like Prop. 103 point man Rollie Heath—the retired corporate chieftain and millionaire from Boulder who even looks like Daddy Warbucks—tried to shame Main Street Colorado into digging into its pockets “for the children.” Meaning, of course, for politicians, whom we all can trust to funnel the loot to layer upon layer of some bureaucracy or another.
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