Governor John Hickenlooper recently embarked on a tour to convince Coloradans to allow him to keep extra tax dollars in an end run around TABOR. Hickenlooper would like to exempt the hospital provider fee from TABOR calculations, which would have allowed him to keep an additional $200 million allegedly for “road projects and classrooms”.
Where have we heard that before? Money into classrooms….. Oh, that’s right, it was the mantra from the failed Amendment 66 debacle in which liberals spent $12 million (or more) to lose by a two-to-one margin.
Nonetheless, Hickenlooper’s tour across the state to keep tax dollars is laughable because he keeps claiming that there’s no fat in the budget, as he told the Denver Post:
“‘Every time someone asks me a question, I feel like asking them, ‘So what do you want me to cut?’ Because there is absolutely no way we can do anything that we are not doing now without cutting from somewhere else. We don’t have additional revenues that are going to start coming in.'”
How about the state cut funding for DinoNauts for starters? Maybe reduce waste and fraud at the Colorado Health Exchange.