The Coalition for Ohio’s Future is a broad-based, bi-partisan organization including teachers and other educators, firefighters, police, elected officials, concerned citizens, social service organizations, business people, doctors and other health professionals, labor unions, senior citizens, faith-based organizations and many others all dedicated to defeating the TEL Amendment.
Fact or Fiction: Response to the Tax Foundation's Distortion of Colorado's TABOR
Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, is a constitutional amendment passed in 1992 that places strict revenue and spending limits on state and local government. The evidence strongly suggests that TABOR has contributed to eroding public services in Colorado. Nevertheless, proponents of spreading Colorado’s TABOR to other states argue that TABOR has been a “success.”
A recent paper by the Tax Foundation argues both that Colorado currently has
an adequate level of public services and that, to the extent there have been
declines in services, that those declines are not related to TABOR.1 The Tax
Foundation charges that critics of TABOR – including the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities – use selective statistics to create a misleading
attack on TABOR and its effect on Colorado. In fact, it is the Tax Foundation
that is viewing Colorado through selective rose-colored glasses.2 Each section
below begins with a claim from the Tax Foundation about TABOR and is followed
by a factual response.
1 Chris Atkins, An Analysis of Misleading Attacks 24, 2005.
2 TABOR’s impacts on Colorado are complicated interacts with several other provisions in the Amendment (residential property tax restriction), makes sorting out causality difficult. See Colorado TABOR, Amendment 23, the Gallagher Amendment, complex interacting provisions. Despite these types of public services before and after TABOR decline. In many cases. it is clear that the legislature required budget cuts to be made.
Read the entire response (.pdf)