The campaign committee to raise taxes by a billion dollars a year, Colorado Commits to Kids, is learning an early lesson in arithmetic.

After feeding the press low-balled figures on how much the tax hike will cost individual taxpayers, their fuzzy math is catching up to them.

Vic Vela from Our Colorado News nailed them on it today:

Initiative 22 would raise taxes on all Colorado taxpayers. The two-tiered proposal would raise income taxes to 5 percent on incomes up to $75,000. Incomes over that amount would be taxed at a rate of 5.9 percent. Colorado’s current income tax rate is a flat 4.63 percent, regardless of income level.

Putting that into perspective, the Colorado Commits to Kids campaign — the group behind the initiative — says that Coloradans with incomes of $30,000 would pay less than $1 a week more in taxes, or about $50 a year. A person making $150,000 would pay a little over $14 a week more in taxes, or $731 a year.

However, opponents correctly point out that those numbers are not based on adjusted gross income, which would mean those with a taxable income of $30,000 would pay an additional $111 a year, while those with taxable incomes of $150,000 would pay an extra $1,230 a year.

Our liberal friends at ColoradoPols today published a table provided by the tax hike campaign claiming the false figures for the billion dollar bill.

Thankfully, the media ain’t buying it. Brandon Rittiman of 9News broke down what the tax hike will mean for Coloradans’ income tax bills.

Here are some examples of the dollar amount of the tax increase, based on TAXABLE earnings after all deductions are made:

• $50,000 income = $185 increase

• $100,000 income = $595 increase

• $250,000 income = $2500 increase

Maybe the proponents of the billion dollar tax increase would be better off spending the million dollars they’ve already raised on some remedial math courses.

Or, as one reader wrote, Colorado Commits to Kids might want to start “committing to math.”